Sample Poems by Judith Skillman
Breath Hunger
As if she were at altitude,
the air thin and cold.
A dilution, a lack.
The same kind of dread
as a death rattle.
Mornings, when she ran uphill,
the trees were swollen
with oxygen. Branches reached
toward her, tentacles
like the octopus.
She was afraid of bright orange,
of what waited on the culvert
along the spit
in the drowning place.
There, below the water line,
etched on steel,
was the tell„
tidal highs and lows
driven by the full moon.
She picked tiny crabs
like berries from metal.
Held them at armÍs length
and watched their legs beat,
miniature pincers
nipping at nothing.
Thought she would like
to hold the octopus
in her mind like a question.
There was nothing
but the bloating
of all that was not hers.
She envied those
who could breathe freely,
laugh, yawn, call the earth home.
Even the chela
had its grasp,
the claw its largesse.
Beatrice
If she blazes beside me,
I might turn to see
a face gone blue with light
from the moon.
If she honors the dead
I may wish for their return,
to finish a conversation,
if only with a ghost.
She sticks to me
like unfinished business,
her cloying presence
that of a celestial nun satisfied
with her lost station.
Under the wimple, in age
and desolation, I see her
more clearly, an apparition
shadowing my left shoulder.
If she wants to carry me
as she would a man,
still I am a woman.
And though the seas
of earth and moon
are lifeless, filled with young men
who died in their prime,
she continues forever
her botched attempts to mother.
Beatrice, like Mary,
a mother figure steeped in platitudes.
A Pollyanna full of proverbs.
A dominatrix, this woman„
so full of sensuality
it was easy to outshine
visions of Paradise,
those poor souls
forever cloistered outside
the white-petaled rose of the godhead.
But Beatrice lied.
When she turned her face
she blinded Virgil.
Where can she stand to live,
this whorish heroine
who stacked apartments
until they became tenements
ripe with the scent
of concupiscence drying,
habitats full of young love,
garbage, white noise,
and cigarettes.
LambÍs Ear
One gray leaf
snipped by finger and thumb
from the larger body
of felt.
Animal for an afternoon.
No particulars,
but the just sun
required to winter over.
Each stem softened
by resemblance,
mimetic as design,
meant to follow
a girl who stands
against a stone wall in the countryside
with her sister.
BouguereauÍs peasant girls,
their eyes enlarged by childhood.
LambÍs ear,
small tangential clump
beholden to the sun.
In faux fur, in imitation,
lie answers pregnant
as the past.
These leaves, pleated
and damp,
make me want
to wonder again,
to care more.
I live in a garden
of questions.
How many, why,
and what for,
the queries
delicate, held tightly
as cashmere,
while the false sheep
sleeps in its coat of leaves.
To propagate
by division
is a motherÍs best wish.
Psyche
Perhaps for her exile
was better than jealousy.
I picture her in the hands
of the Romans,
woman too beautiful
to be a mother.
Everyone knows a mother
would die for her son.
Would rather lie down
like a daughter with Oedipus
than admit her own cupidity.
On Spring days
Psyche walks past Cupid
wearing a thin chain of yellow gold.
What Venus does best„
rises, sets, creates hardships.
Like the pink core
of a shell, or a mor³,
Venus is dense. SheÍs
the mother of Cupid in all his stupidity.
There is still time
for the thing to catch fire,
to smoke and smolder
like a bed of peat. Jupiter,
how this cool wind blows on my soul.
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