Two
poems from Teresa Leo's The Halo Rule
followed
by a note on the author
Call
Across the Seasons
Four
Octobers ago, upstairs at the Halloween party,
prone on the bed. Still in the post mortem
of
the last phone call, where the definition of abide
meant more putting up with than being there for,
as
in, disappointment, as in, an obscene bouquet
of something seasonal next to the bed,
the
bed's coiling crushed beneath my collapsed,
my vacant body, a seizure in reverse.
Downstairs
the party went on,
a gross disproportion of forgiveness and light.
I
didn't know then that four years later
the next call would come,
the
way wind can go from zero to a hundred
in 2.5 seconds, tear the trees from the trees,
as
in, a door flung open, as in, lovers at a party
looking for an empty room, coats sprawled on beds,
like
the long dead or newly rehearsed.
He'd say my name wrong after just four years,
would
want to know what became of the peony
pressed in the pages of a book,
that
flawed dance. But he'd really mean
fire, as in, there's no way to fully escape
the
tyranny of certain flowers,
the ones that fail overnight or flame
between
the pages of a long lost book.
What would matter in the end
is
that he'd say my name wrong,
say it outright without hesitation,
a
perverted overture, this law of eternal return,
ghost bed, a deep-six version, a strangled vowel.
P.S.
The
end is not near. We've passed the end, and it's so far back
it's like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a
field
of
many dots in a painting a myopic man is straining to see
in a village museum near a city we've never been to
nor
will. It's so far back I can't remember the exact
moment of it, the way I didn't see the curve ball coming,
the
one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. It's the part of the eraser
worn
down to the black metal band, the one that left
hideous gashes in the page of the test the math teacher
sprung
on us, so many equations without solutions,
numbers that divided like soldiers on a reconnaissance mission,
then
divided again. It's in the back of the closet
in the box of Thank You cards I put stamps on
and
never sent. It's that last conversation,
the staccato of conjunctions that kept each noun at bay,
the
one that wound down to the luxury of nonspecifics –
the possibility of or, the horror of but, the
delusion of and.
It
passed me by, the way beauty, like disease,
has been known to skip a generation.
©
Teresa
Leo's work has appeared in the American Poetry Review,
Poetry, Ploughshares, the Women's Review of
Books, New Orleans Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer,
Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere.
She has received grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts,
the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
She works at the University of Pennsylvania. The Halo Rule
is
winner of the Elixir Press Editor's Prize and will be published
by Elixir in 2008.
"P.S."
first appeared in the Women's Review of Books.If
you need more, please let me know. Further information can also
be found on my author's website, www.bruceberger.net
