James Keane Verse-Virtual 2016 December

December 2016

Here are two poems with differing views of giving. "Sweet and Poison" is about a gift I wish I could give to a dear friend of mine but especially to her husband whose deep-seated anger and bouts of depression have made for a rocky marriage that has survived for four decades. "Two Days Before A Christmas" is addressed to a beautiful young lady I happened to notice while stopped at a red light on Ninth Avenue in New York City during a long-ago Christmas holiday. What she suddenly, and unexpectedly, offered to me as I passed, not stopping, through the intersection made it very clear that my happy holiday was neither happy nor a holiday for her.

Sweet and Poison

If I could make a gift to you
of unconditional love, I wouldn’t
wrap it up, but serve it, beaming,
in a cup for you to drink from,
as needed. Pass it down
to the man who celebrates
solitude when he sees you. And if
he will not drink from your cup, down
where he is or up where you
need him: When death would
appease him more than the children
you bore him please him – and still
you will not leave him: Don’t appeal
to his heart or reason. Tell him it’s sweet
and poison.

First published in Grawlix Poetry.

Two Days Before A Christmas

The coat surrounds you
still, fastening you, black
as the chill of the huddled
one staring down and away

from the stop light. Yet daring
anyone, Smile with eyes coated
in darkness, until red brightens
to green and, eyes coping, mouth

hoping, tenderly you unwrap your
thighs. Daughter of someone (the hag
who shared you?). Mother, lover
(of no one?) in the years that came

due. Take back your eyes,
your smile, your tendered
thighs breathing, filling a corner
of living in an otherwise dead

December. Wrap them against
the chill surrounding you (still?),
that fastened your will
to the huddled one

two days before a Christmas
I cannot remember.

First published in Scissors & Spackle.

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