Barbara Crooker Verse-Virtual 2016 December

December 2016

Here's a poem from my new book, Les Fauves, coming out from C&R Press early next year http://www.crpress.org/shop/les-fauves/

Espagnole: Harmonie en Bleu, 1923
-Henri Matisse

Why shouldn’t the dead go on speaking?
Here is a woman in a lace mantilla,
black fan snapped shut, bangles
on her wrists, arm resting on a table.
Around her neck, a choker of pearls.
She looks in my eyes straight as a shot
of Cognac. Her mouth parts slightly.
What is she trying to say? I have been
listening, hoping to hear my own dead friends:
Clare, Michèle, Adrianne. Snippets
come to me in birdsong, in gesture,
in the dark wing of a stranger’s hair.
But it’s like deciphering code, or reading
through water. The dead have their own
language. Are they restless, do they long
to come back, smell peonies in spring?
Or is being dead enough, the end of the story,
the book gently closing, and the conversation over?

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