Sample Poems by Pamela Harrison

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Biting Kate

After he leaves, each day a battle of wills.
"Let's fold the clothes like so," Mother says.
Not much taller than the willow basket, Kate
levels a long look at Mother's method, then
takes the given towel in hand and, presto-chango-
wads it into a ball and tosses it down then
squints up as if to say, "So there."

Morning moves on. Mom bellows, "NO!"
so loud the child sits backward on the floor.
Soon, the usual fight over putting the red boots on.
Minutes after Mother gets home from the nursery
the teacher calls to inquire if there's been trouble:
seems Kate has bitten one of the other kids.
Mother's cheeks glow with shame.

Who could imagine a child as willful as her own?
A grown adult, beleaguered by a four-year-old!
Some days later, Kate tries her teeth at home.
Against all the books she's refused to read,
without thinking and in a trice, Mother bites her back.
Shocked, they both regard the marks on their arms.
Kate never bites again.

---

Today's Special

Today we have February snow
so deep the deer are using sidewalks

to get around. The pointy tracks
of their hooves' halved hearts mince

like girls wearing their first high heels,
then disappear at the road as though

they hitched a ride on the logging truck
that lumbered by a while ago.

(No. The dignity of their ears says, "No."
The white flags of their tails say, "No.")

Meanwhile, with their tongues panting like hot dogs'
beneath my bed, a pair of sneakers park, still green

from mowing grass- (Remember grass?
Where furry moles swam with their little pink feet?)

buried now in deep-six sleep. Next summer, those
shoes will slide me downhill on my butt because

there's no tread on the sole. (Oh, my soul. Oh, life,
worn down at the heel.) Such are the specials,

my friends. I'd serve them
on a blue plate if I could.

---

Galileo Taught the Value of Eccentrics
Miles from the highway you see her
fins flown rare as feathers
from the murk, quick
glint of windshield
axle-deep in March.

Seventy-three and yeasty, she
lives alone in a '52 Buick
perched green as a cockatoo
on the bare shoulder of Vermont,
swigging raw eggs

and keeping time with the sun.
In the driver's seat of that
commodious solitude,
singular above the shaven fields,
she gets along

with a typewriter
and a few great books,
a golden cat that answers to Resolve,
a fine fur coat and a flashlight.
She takes exception seriously,

is fond of crashing class reunions
to try the bar, the cognac
and the grads on points of law.
Peculiarity and the rule,
Galileo knew that

certainties unhinged
are shoved aside. Deviation glitters
(no stanza break)
against a curtained dark, magically
spinning in place
above the gloved finger of

a prestidigitator who knows
mastering illusion is
no mean trick.
Only our consent
sustains his sleight of hand.
Pinning down the truth
is slippery business.
Singularity
has been known
to pry a universe.

And on a leaden day
beside a stone
a single scilla might
by itself shrug off
the frozen weight of winter.

---

South Rim

The river gnaws its scar
beneath pocked sky,
stone cannibal turned
on itself, engorging
earth's picked bones:
infernal mountains
riven down,
enormity,
edge and drop.

I take your photograph
at slowest shutter speed,
holding my breath against
the gathering stroke of light.

You, silhouetted against
such indecipherable scale,
handprint on a sandstone wall,
dim image imposed on
eons' rainbow layers.

And all our rituals
of comfort and civilization
turn curious as shamans
squatting in wormed dust
to stir the stinking bowels of birds,
tribal lines of duty strung
like glinting ropes about
slender necks of Nilotic girls,
chains of golden rings
and bloody circumcision,
worn about us, kept upon us,

sacred totems, tying
discontinuous threads
into colored knots,
messages run by foot
across high plains and
rope-spanned voids
in the ceaseless, slow-
motion dream of meaning.

Rules everyone knows
the game of. We wait
and wait for the moment.

But still meet
two faces at the lens:
the untranslated equation
of love and molecules,
streaming effluence that
signifies none other, light's
bright echoes ringing
down memory's broken scree,
raising the palpable shine
of sun setting beyond
a lover's arm.