Sharon Kraus’s books include Strange Land (University Press of Florida, 2002), which was a finalist in the 2000 National Poetry Series, and Generation (Alice James Books, 1997). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Massachusetts Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Agni and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, an Editors' Choice award from Columbia: A Magazine of Literature and Art, and a group of new poems were selected as a finalist in the 2002 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition.
How I wonder what you are (sung)
among the initial human impulses
we sob when we wake alone
the light line of bereft
horizon
into which rises
oh, that’s a scaffold
the building being built bones
(planks, sheeting)
you sob until you are joined
[Where a week ago in a workday
scaffolding snapped and a man
(he had been welding
disparate parts into a)]
The boy’s watching builders, tools, the orange
earthmovers one does not like to ask him to
sunder himself from the / beloved rendering
Sometimes his eyes remain closed as he cries with his mouth Mama-Mama
what shape is permitted entry
but later, on the sidewalk, I am not that.
Right breast stinging bear the still-milk
thataway
Call him My child what’s definite what’s possessive
[The windowframe in the wall The man dying on the sidewalk
and who to _____]
Inside artisans are painting clouds and a full
onto the night
( the sculptor does not die for her art she makes
a stainless steel spider The work is called “Maman” )
(up the ladder one lightly speckled painter
calls down He should be up here helping
as though the boy (trans
fixed) cannot hear
the impulse is to gaze drinkingly upon the beauty
or the ______ to stay at the feet of
where you cannot enter its blue prelude )
call it loyal call it labile
finally one of us consents to go when Another says
Do you want to paint a moon? Let’s go home then
and do that.
Study in Movement
The man punching holes in the air.
You would like to consult someone about this
urge to draw the veil before
your child
has tasted too much madness
(he’s eating tuna-sandwich on the summer
bench)
When you pushed his shoulders back onto the bed
shouting Just go to sleep
(But you had thought you could feed your child a different
diet)
How easy to pack up and leave yellow-shirted strangers [That he reaches out for you
The boy, though, says “Man” furrowedly anyway instead ]
And the man lies down on his stone slab and says
“Sweet”
You are familiar with the bursting out after a stillness
Fill the toy with enough sand and the bucket tips to turn
the wheel
Your mother filled with her nine calm days would speed to her churning
pool [sparring hard against
her shadowed child]
So you wipe his mouth slowly and mildly
push the stroller as though you feared neither ravings nor yourself
*
You lift the shirt over your face
to re-
appear. Which shows the child
how he might grow to love
your broken presence
He enjoys this gesture and uses it
to indicate his imminent departure.
He likes it when you call longingly for him.
*
So what’s the logic here?
Before all that afternoon
and in between the mother-burstings
he bent to the cosmos of the sidewalk ants
and would not leave them. The mother counseling gentleness,
mustn’t touch-ness. The ants
were hurrying off to get their lunch.
And before all that afternoon
the white-haired man on the subway
combing the thick strands
carefully with a plastic fork. White, a different white. His sack of clothes
at his feet. He’s watching his combing in a brass plaque
at the top of the subway stairs. If one had to do without mirrors. You hold the child up
to mirrors invariably saying Who’s that
to enact for him the pleasure of the first meeting.
Climbing toward West Broadway you want to enshawl the old man’s shoulders
with your inner arm, the soft you can muster,
“That’s lovely. That’s such nice combing.”
They’ve discovered eleven more moons
clamoring around Jupiter’s knees. Which
were there all along.
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