Three Poems

by Alice B. Fogel

 

Beautiful 

                What if what you had will be
from a distance
                clear though it had been
up close
                indecipherable
it could end
                the day before tomorrow
and not yet right              not enough
                even then will you admit it
how it might be like the moment
                before you say a name
you don’t remember
                until that moment
like when the chance
                meeting meant love
when the dying
                becomes sure death
as if there were no difference
                will you know    finally
will you want     perhaps
                everything          wish
that when you’d wished someone
                would do what
someone wished you would do
                you had done it
you know you do
               want to have made
something          that beautiful       
               what if you’re never forced
to form it             mid-sentence
               mid-life and you are not
ready when you do
               slip into the cool hole
you dug
               hand me down my flute
you could say                     reaching up
               though you’ve never
played the flute
               then alone in those last days
with your heart
               emptying             you play              
for your life

 

Estuary

Shorebirds ray the salt marshes:
             light-
                          limned feathers
walking on water
             and you
                          can’t breathe
in the same few inches: you fill up:
             smaller birds
                           scatter
whenever the osprey shadows
             over and the plovers
                           and godwits
are busy studying the shallows:
             so much to see:
                           they notice
everything: but you and the mouth
             of the river
                           enter
the sea through the wide threshold
             crossing silt
                           seemingly
endlessly: once
             you took bridges
                           across the bay
or traced a way
             along the margins: stayed
                           horizoned
near: why now
             will you go on flinging
                           yourself to
the breakers
             letting
                           the waves take you:
gulls
             tilt and the terns
                           arrow down:
you sink again
             and again persistent
                           as the tide: only
the tide comes back: you swallow
             the brine: every night
                           grasses set new roots
in the dunes: every dawn the dew
             closes the distance
                            between
itself and spume: you can’t
             tell the difference 
                            between what
you never had and what you’re losing:
             the osprey dives and
                            rises: one fish
in its talons: you can’t lift the nets
             heavy
                            with your daily practice
of dying
             just enough
                             to keep from drowning

 

Hope

Because things didn’t go the other way they couldn’t,
I went on, narrowly
freed from having to concede.

All night, every night: peace only dreaming. This way,
looking back, at least I could see it had always been

like mornings used to be, hooded and brimming with bees.
Maybe you’ll decide it was the fault of memory’s

infernal tunnels: someone’s, surely, or all of them. Because
it will probably turn out to have been, also, like the loons,

how they would dip like needles piercing and,
just after I’d give up hope of them ever rising, rise

impossibly far from where my hopes had been.

 

Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her collections include A Doubtful House, Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” (winner of the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry), & Be That Empty, a national poetry bestseller, & she is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web & ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, & DIAGRAM.