January 2020
Sarah White
sarahwhitepages@gmail.com
Author's Note:  I’ve promised myself many times to give up writing poetry, but no longer think I’m capable of keeping my promise.

Melodeon Memory

I grow as old as Old
Grace Greene,
who learned by feel
each gravel curve
that traveled down
from her home
on Lincoln Pond.

How, with hunched shoulders
and strained gaze,
could she hold the wheel
while we children,
mindless, fussed behind
her in the rumble seat?

Sundays, for a service
in the village,
I sat beside her at the organ,
and provided, if she nodded,
the page I thought
she needed. Only,

she had memorized
the whole of Pond
Hill Road, and could play
by heart “Old Hundredth”
for the One who, every
summer, fed her pond
until it overflowed.

For Marie Ponsot (1921-2019)

From a stone divan in Cimetière
Père Lachaise, Guillaume Apollinaire
decrees: “Marie graduates today
with High Honors.
Sarah stays.”

As you depart, Marie,
please stop a while to watch me
practicing old age
with this slender cane:

I tap it on the ground
to nudge my twisting spine
back into line.

My left hand, on rainy days,
holds a flimsy umbrella, and my right
holds the cane, leaving no hand free to turn
the pages of The Times. Yet I hear
the news of you, and learn:

Ferlinghetti was your early friend.
Your poems are more erudite and elegant
than mine. Your seven kids
remained nearby until the end.
My two are far away.

You’re flying to Elysium now.
I’d like to follow,
but I don’t know how.
"For Marie Ponsot" is from a collection forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions.
©2020 Sarah White
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