February 2025
Bio Note: My new poetry collection, Steady, is out from Dos Madres Press, and it includes my prize-winning poems, “Lady Bird” and “Being Ruth Asawa.” My Ethel Zine chapbooks—Surrealist Muse, Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, and Being Ruth Asawa—are for sale in the gift shop of the Whitney Museum of American Art, with a new one, Adrienne Fidelin Restored, soon to be published.
All for Love
I
Wistfully, Teddy fingered the slender wineglass stem,
remembering leisurely Friday afternoons
whiled away with William at Jacques’ Brasserie
over three glasses of Burgundy and steak tartare,
while William shuddered into his pasta,
each fondly mocking the other,
the student rapt before the master.
II
Determination took Eugene
to the podium after the stroke.
To keep his hand from shaking,
he gripped the lectern and didn’t let up.
Blinded by the bright lights,
he couldn’t see the audience,
but feeling their regard,
his spirit soared,
and his speech rang clear and true.
III
After listening to two bars,
Bennett could identify the music,
not only the composition,
but the orchestra and the conductor.
It was all for love—
his only profit—
no one else can so enlighten us.
In Old England
The sun was at its most restful level,
just before sunset when its rays are slanting,
and everything glows. The yellow stone
of the parish church seemed warm and alive,
and the gravestones in its ancient yard
threw long shadows over the mounds.
I never saw such a patched-up church,
a mixture of styles, each one
interrupted by an addition
before it had a chance
to follow out its lines.
Arches grew out of each other
like suckers on a stump;
its windows had grown cataracts
and were quite blind.
I walked to the village in the evening,
and from a distance the sight
of the spire felt momentous,
the yew trees black
against an electric blue sky
where one star twinkled
past the tip of the steeple.
I thought, if only I could play piano
the way I felt, I’d be worth listening to!
It felt romantic to walk up and down streets
where the half-timbered houses
were blue in the twilight,
and here and there a light shone in a kitchen
where a table was laid for supper.
That night I lay in bed in a brown room
and watched the moon come up
over my windowsill,
and the next morning the sun
did the same stunt in the same place.
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