Featured Poet: February 2012 Vol. 4 # 4

 
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Kate Falvey
 
 
Kate Falvey's work has appeared in a number of print and online magazines, including Memoir(and), Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Hoboeye, Umbrella, CRIT, Inscribed, Hearing Voices, OVS, Literary Mama, Women Writers, The Mom Egg, the Aroostook Review, Shot Glass Journal and is forthcoming in Italian Americana. She is on the editorial board of the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center's Bellevue Literary Review and is editor in chief of the 2 Bridges Review. She teaches at New York City College of Technology/CUNY and lives with her daughter in Long Beach, New York.
 
 
 
Spitting Image
 
Fractured, this image of a swan:
early morning, early June,
a slow sun ruffling the clouds
where they tend to their nest of storms.
Egrets watch, aloof familiars, from
the blighted coven of skeletal cedar
and red maple, dead, still reaching,
intricate with power.
And the cygnets rake coils in the green
stillness of the marsh, their mothers prodding
pondweed and stonewort, harrying the tadpoles.
There is a scrim of birch and alder, and more
herons skimming for snakes and fishing-spiders
as light curls and dabs haphazardly.
Lured by the hazy peace, I blunder 
from my clumsy blind and venture
to a translucent verge, too flimsy to bar
my love-sick gazing.
An inch too far and I am beset by
an eruption of  wing and hissing.
The egrets don’t lift a feather to save me.
 

 
 
Slipping Down the Mud Bank
 
The spot where the child’s high chair
was up-ended
was bright with ferns and creepers,
wisteria and jewelweed wanton in
a mossy undertow
of run-off from the vague peril of
the listing, storm-addled road.
A slow mist clung like stifled thought
and shaped elfish hints of fear
which I subdued while reaching for
a cloudy-seeming rung as if the chair
were root or reed and would provide
a hand-hold or a stair as the creek bank
dissolved into a sodden, undulating lair.
 
There was a strange animation in the
chipped red of the high chair’s tray,
a ruddy evanescent glow of memory,
perhaps, or wooden dread,
a flash of muted color fixed
inside the diffuse, muddled grey
of drizzle, clay, and sand. I took
 
a stand and melded into mud,
knee and ankle splayed, distended,
the sudden swell more shocking than
predicament or pain. How long
I lay and shivered before shifting, rocking
a hair’s-breadth turn from break to bruise,
I still can’t say, but then, I spied
emerging from the startled ooze,
a silver baby rattle, blackened,
swaddled in bedraggled curls
of goldenrod and bracken.
When lifted free and scraped,
this age-clenched random find exposed
my own initials etched
in murky swirls on the twisted handle.
 
Arms outstretched, I grabbled, rose,
shaken, shaking, to somewhat higher ground.
My proof escaped as I ascended,
rattling down the slippery slope
to where some day, no doubt,
some other wanderer will unearth it
when she stumbles.
“But whose initials will be found?”
I vaguely wondered, hoped,
pushing through veils of fog
into the jolt of a clear and sudden
play of light.
 
 
 
 
Sister Moon
 
I could put you to rights if
you had half a mind.
What I’d tell you is this:
your illness has it right;
nothing is starlit, nothing is over,
nothing is sacred, everything
 is scarred.
 
You insist on your right
to a past of snares and peril,
eyes without mercy, thickets
of giddy abandonments and
relentless disregard,
 boggy distensions where only a small shoe
lies crumpled on the verge.
 
Your vision is complete.
The same images flicker chronically;
the pain mechanical and prescribed.
You’ve never realized it was you
who  told all those ghastly lies.
 
 
 
 
 
Lucky Stiff
 
Cautious, she is, at thirteen,
visiting the Christmas city from the sticks.
She’s heard of tricks the monsters in the dark
are wont to play, scenting for young blood in the
thickets of the Park. She’s smart, but she’s
deliberately afraid.
She’s heard about the killings and the stalkings and
the gangs, the women turned to ashes in their glares.
They mark you unawares, then mutate into vicious
feral things. They catch your shyness in their eyes,
then spring.
Tricked out in its mesmerizing glow, the greens
and silvers smearing filmy ribbons in the snow,
 
the city sings
of winter work and want, wealth, and wry imaginings,
its complications muted in the gold
and dingy red tinged drifts,
the heft of gifts sparkling, crisply earnest, in
the high-strung shopping bags. She
has on her proud glad-rags, her thin-soled sling-back shoes,
like a coy suburban match-girl in the chips. Of course, she slips
into a frosty puddle of a cashmered gent, who drops his
briefcase, guard, and all pretence. Boozily roused
and absurdly unamused, he spits
 something unholy then flips
 this innocent the bird. Or maybe I misheard?
Or rashly misconstrued?
Before I, huffy Auntie Mame, can swing
to ineffectual defense, he murmurs season’s greetings
and slips into the huddling  unreason of the street.



The charming flurry in the lamplight, heckled
by crass, impatient  winds,
winds which, wilding,  push
us indoors where spills of  safe, spectacular
year-round lights dance, dazzling, over dancers –
whose nightly peril is latent in mistiming or missteps.
 
She
is frozen and forlorn, worrying her premonition:
we’ll have to pass the Park again,
there may well be thugs galore in store.
 
I tell her during intermission
that though this is a hungry, brutish world,
the brutes are far between and mostly dormant,
mostly tame.
A million passersby will pass the Park a million times,
will keep their purses, plans, and lives.
The bad that happens mostly doesn’t.
 
Self-satisfied, I think I’ve squared away her fear.
But when we tour the night again, she lags, sits
stiffly by the frozen fountain, demands
a taxi for a present.
 
 




 
 
 
 
 

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