Marsha Pomerantz
Two poems from Marsha Pomerantz’s Gneiss
followed by a note on the author
The God’s Honest Truth
By saying so little about love
I was lying. That I didn’t know
what it was was the truth. When
I said all Cretans are liars I was
elsewhere in the archipelago,
fleeing home. When I said
I was living Zeno’s paradox,
that was half a lie. Even
as I confess, I’m stealing
glances at your ear, thinking
how can truth make all those
turns and reach another brain
intact? You know how molecules
of air have to race over the curve
of a wing to keep up with their
friends taking the straight path
below? That’s how we get lift.
Marsha Pomerantz
Saint Luke Paints the Virgin
As soon as his brush lifted,
the elixir of her withdrew,
leaving her mud in small
shaped phrases. He was
painting his desire to hold
her always and want her
never. I’d trade always for
an apple, said the assistant,
stroking the arc of a cheek as
his teeth marked minutes along
his lips. Holiness is separation,
pooling just beyond depiction
in a single swimming thought.
That Luke could ever get her
down was either blasphemy
or fantasy, and both options
beckoned. Know me, he heard her say.
Take my likeness, make me likely.
Marsha Pomerantz
Marsha Pomerantz grew up in New York, lived in Israel for twenty years, and now lives in Boston. A collection of her poems, The Illustrated Edge, was published by Biblioasis in 2011, and poems and essays have appeared in/on Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, PN Review, Raritan, Salamander, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Translations from the Hebrew include a novel, short stories, and poems. Her writing has been supported by two residencies at the MacDowell Colony and a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in poetry, and Gneiss was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2014. Work in journalism and museum publishing has kept her fed and fueled the poems; she retired in 2013 as managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums, and continues editing art books as a freelancer.
The God’s Honest Truth
and Saint Luke Paints the Virgin
first appeared in Raritan.