Sample Poems by Judith Skillman
The Victorian Plume
Calls me back to days
when Mother’s hair was long,
pinned up by bobby pins.
She put no stock in beauty,
rested instead on physics
and the mathematics of sweaters and recipes—
her personal Victoriana.
With its fan-shaped design,
this glass carving might have cooled
a sultry Maryland night
ornamented by prudery, bigotry.
Innocence was broken in childhood.
Its architecture remained ornate
if sulky, milky bevels lit
like marble within the hunger for closure.
On a piece of cedar, the night light
perches, a hummingbird
behind the Victorian plume.
In a guest room, behind a brick house—
there lies respectability,
even as fruit molders and hurt simmers.
I remember a shimmer of pleats,
and Olga waking to walk
from the Holocaust untouched.
How stiffly she moved
beneath the brocade garments
that shone like sun and moon.
Such massive furniture, even in memory,
must be decorated with glass.
Neither liquid nor solid,
glass is a sandy beach
where no lovers walk.
The insult of fifty years
has come and pronounced me well.
Is it this body of freshwater
where the seasons’ bloodied, bruised salmon
coast towards shore,
weighed down by unlaid eggs and silt?
An Artisan’s Dream
A frozen brook. The water marbled
although it wasn’t winter, each flower
leaf, and stem outlined in foil.
I would call this death
were it not for the way
sleeves of light crept along the veins.
The creek frozen at a crook,
water like seracs, each wave
stuck to the surface like marble,
although it wasn’t winter.
Silence a place I remembered,
swirling through cement easements.
Since it wasn’t winter, I felt
out of place. To brush against
those garish flowers, each one perfect—
no roses, just fat peonies,
rows and columns of dahlias,
pinks fixed in a grimace…
Leaves symmetric under a gauze sky,
stems wide and close to rich dirt.
Patina, burnished, banished
one plant from another. No roses.
Sultry nights, long days where the ice white sun
emblazoned its sear of scar.
I couldn’t say whether copper or gold
had been used to outline each plant
in Paradise, the same conjoined garden
where Eve became infamous
and Adam an accomplice. I only felt
a certain heaviness.
Asleep, were it not for the way
my eyes took in nuance.
Awake, except for sleeves of light
that crept along veined, prismatic bevels.
Was each cat’s paw pane a façade?
Still stuck to a root of lead
I stepped into the ice water
of a claw foot tub.
On the wall a mirror, black with glue.
The Stone in Glass
Flintware. Tiffany had gone to Brooklyn
for custom-made pieces,
following on the heels
of La Farge.
The press of marketing favrile
took its toll on the man
who would later
sum up what was most precious—
petal, leaf, decanter, clapper,
the centermost portion of design.
*
That copper should adhere to glass
by the fat in animal skins.
Layers of pleats,
clear panels to see what lay beyond
the curtain of opacity.
Palimpsest made by a horse’s hoof
upon a leaf
over malleable earth.
That the iridescent sun and moon
might be seen not as they were,
but as secrets.
That the rag passed over mirror
if it did not act out drama,
as in reflection, imitation, mimesis.
That patterns might be called ‘cartoons.’
*
Scissors eating the black line,
and numbers. Lead and copper foil,
beeswax that later
melted—Tiffany’s lamps
jiggled in the presence of women and children.
*
What if glass were conditional,
a substance
neither fluid nor solid.
Under what terms
then might one surrender?
Does the curve bend sharply
where it should angle gently
as a fishing rod
bent to the weight of trout,
catfish, bottom fish, or worse?
*
Bell with no clapper,
fan that moves no air,
leaves deathless in red, orange, gold—
whether folded or pronged.
The cat’s paw
neither man would live to see.
*
Because in time nothing seeps
to the bottom except myth.
Dionysius’ cup razed by fire,
Prometheus chained to the rock again,
his liver and heart
equal to the eagle or vulture.
The talismans are endless—
sailboat, mandala, flower, stem, bell.
The stone’s not in favor of comfort.
Stone in one’s shoe, proverbial
soup made with cabbage and stones.
Jumars, pitons, and dead men for climbers.
Whatever is put under the knife
and does not tell.
Sea Smoke
“When the difference between air and water temperature is such that
fog rises from the ocean…”
As far as winter
stretches, I am alone
on this cliff
staring down at what
could be fog or steam or mist.
The whisper of reeds recalls
a wound I barely remember,
a figure who could be…
As far as we are apart,
as old as that
and more, our differences,
the complaint you mustered
upon finding heat coalesced
into a lump.
The body, cremated, can be compressed
to diamonds. Stroke of gray
on a gull, prescience,
hull of the boat that might have saved Icarus
when he came of age…
As far as the dead are concerned,
the sun is smoke
the moon milk,
stars salt. With seared eyes
the dead see the living,
hunched figures
who find by dreaming
what it is they are looking for.
A glimpse of cloth,
bone of hanger left between a coat
torn from its closet
and the marred dowel
from which hung
garment bags. Mothballs
of ancient Styrofoam,
the insects have eaten
through silk, cashmere, linen,
and more.
Hat that should have been worn
in minus centigrade—
the dead see
our flesh in tatters
and the foreshortened days,
foreshadowing.
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