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by Rhina P. Espaillat
Source: The Shadow I Dress In , p. 87
The marsh in early spring, that patient view
accommodating clouds and changing blue,
reflects both in a deeply shallow gaze
where everything finds room and nothing stays
Stippled with rain or rifled as by oars
plied by the wind in passing between shores,
the marsh is neither different not rhe same,
both moving and at rest, like tide or flame.
Heaven is what it looks at and then makes
double, below in silty brown where snakes
crook their thick muscled length through tangled weeds.
The marsh will never fathom whatit reads,
the sea that salts its grasses, the gull's cry,
nothing inscribed in what we call the sky.
--------------------
Alzheimer's
by Rhina P. Espaillat
Source: The Shadow I Dress In, p. l9
Her look is like a doorway opening
into a scene of ruin so complete
that sense recoils as from the acrid air
of sick rooms after death, and no live thing
welcomes the eye or sniffs about the feet.
By half-light in the shattered cavern where
photographs once climbed beside a stair
up to clean bedrooms where the light was sweet
with order --look: a cheek, a splintered brow,
an eye in broken glass, on a torn sheet.
Everything here cries out, Retreat, retreat --
but listen: in this wreckage, even now,
a bird, alive somewhere, trying --but how
where nothing else endures? --to be, to sing.
-------------------
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