Two
poems from Dora Malech's Shore Ordered Ocean
followed
by a note on the author
Treasure
Hunting
Soon
to be a low moon and elsewhere
fire. Lucky mountain shone copper
but not
to pocket. Not that kind of angel
between
maybe and the blaze. Asked
to hold my baby. Didn't envy gravity
to lug
its chubby moon from under.
Dear
dire said the radio and oh I was
its girl. Called it a silver un-bridge
a
single listing trestle. Someday sounded
the
siren of a false all-clear. May I?
My skein all un-spun under fire.
The
spider alive in a primrose.
The
baby bent to an iris and willing
her face to unfurl. I wanted to watch
the
coupling trains. Had never seen
machines
in love before. No arrowheads
but among ordinary stones red flint from
which
one had maybe once been broken.
The
sky streaks with diurnal war paint.
Touches on baby's pulse where
a dream
tries to surface. Touches
as the horsemen do (indeed) pass by
the monarch
in said spider's web
where struggles spin to filigree.
A
Shortcut
A hedgehog shuffles out to take a moment
of the moon. The moon leaves off
trying on
cloud after cloud to render for a moment
the frowsy foliage
and the nose beneath
in tenebrous strokes, not light and dark,
but light
in dark or light in spite of.
Doesn't rinse the brush to touch the lilies'
brief white swash and sticky spots
of seeds and pulp where the karakas
bend
and drop their drupes. Sprays of stone-fruit
come to sweet rot underfoot
with a stench
that in a warmer, brighter hour would draw
the flies to
feed at each smear adhered, here
to the asphalt switchback and there to the
stairs
that teeter through the terraces and past
the walls that prop the
city up above the sea,
walls studded with snails after a day of rain.
The
young snails resemble pearl barley, pale,
scattered as at some strange matrimony,
the old are dark burls grown somehow from brick.
Egalitarian spectrum
renders the memory
of the sun's gaudy palette obsolete
here where each
edge is a glint and each
hollow, a shadow. Holds at first glance each
as
distant and as dear, though an eye that waits
to warm to, lets its iris open
into
finds that though both take a glimmer, the shell
knows one way to
shine and the body, another.
The former's luster, a crystal ball in which
one sees the muddy future, the latter,
a small brown tongue pronouncing
"like" against
a concrete palate, careful. Only the wind hurries
here, and the leaves turn aside to let it pass,
shake disapproval. A spider
rests
after mending its nets, sits at the center
of tenuous nebula wound
from catkin
to fern frond to the black beaks of the last flax,
an almost-still-life.
Here a twitch and there
a shiver and each snail's nacreous wake
belies
if not progress then process,
illuminated glyphs, transient text, a glisten
spelling
if not here-to-there then
somewhere-to-somewhere
by way of these walls
that hold the hills from
their someday certain spill into the harbor
a moment
more and then another moment
more for each of our small sakes.
©
Dora
Malech's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry,
American Letters & Commentary, the Yale Review, Denver Quarterly,
Best New Zealand Poems, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is a
2008-09 Teaching Fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and she
will be a Writing Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy in
the summer of 2009.
"Treasure
Hunting" first appeared in Poetry; "A Shortcut" first appeared
in Best New Poets 2007.
