Sample Poems by Marjorie
Thomsen
I Took a Man to the
Mapparium
Oh, I know, the Mapparium is where school
children go:
a first portal to see a world
they won't fall off. Our planet of 1935,
a hot spot for field trips.
But I took a man
to the Mapparium. I wanted to show him
how all the oceans glow
hues of blue, place
his brown-sugar eyes inside that glass globe
of color-reds as bold and
immaculate
as the pomegranate's seed. After looking north,
after looking south, I
hoped he would look straight
and kiss me as if he had just discovered
America. I imagined
his love let loose
among continents, fjords and islands
labeled in ancient, aching
script; his body
between me and the pirates rowing the
Seven Seas. Suspended on the
sphere's
thirty-foot, see-through bridge, we hung in the heart
of the map's
plumpness. I unraveled for him
how the acoustic curve carries whispers across
the
distance; we moved apart and I waited for ardor
to travel-turning my head east, turning
my head
west, but the man I took to the Mapparium
only walked toward EXIT. We
returned
to the real world, his hand on the flat of my
back.
Rosealee's Love Song to
Joseph
-after Jim Harrison's novel Farmer
You ruined me,
not for
the ancient, broken barn
and not for its rock station
playing nonstop to keep
coyotes
from the coop. You ruined me
not for the peacock in his
sharp blue suit
waltzing alone
on the rafters, nor for the geometry
of cobwebs. You ruined me not
for
the mud-black cat I cradle
nor for saying goodnight to a field
of cornstalk ghosts in the
dark.
You ruined me not for the language
of roosters telling me something
that cannot
be improved upon. You
ruined me not for the industrious
mother swallow zooming
in
and out of a nest feeding four
mouths stretched to little zeros.
You've ruined me for
wanting
to smooth any other man's woolen
shirt. You've ruined me for pouring
any
other man his whiskey, for kissing
him, for taking anyone other than you
to see the
ocean.
It's 20 things but it isn't 19
-Tom
Stoppard on love and Anna Karenina
They imagined garlands because of a few four-leaf
clovers
found in a field while kneeling in summer.
Saving the greens, he put them deep
between
cool pages, where the spine anatomically cracked, not atop
her ear, near
hair, like a yellow pencil or real blossoms.
(Not that she guided his hand there.) The
structure
of the nights couldn't keep up with luck: strawberries
in a container of lost
green, the berries brought
into each other without flashbacks of staining,
canning,
pies. There was too much counting on the way
the wind blew, the cut of slate to
shape their posture
when they lay on the kitchen floor. They wouldn't consider
a
secret pact slipped into her dress's placket
or that it mattered. Maybe it was one too-many
things,
to know the variable that makes comestibles sizzle, endure;
what degree of pinch
and release affects the force of spices'
fall, joy into hot oil. Later, after lathering, they
couldn't
see their bodies were too rinsed, too clean-the exactitude
of earth's dimmer
switch had tugged sun from the field,
a skylight, the air from ankles to
zenith.
In the Hour
In the hour
of our
full capacity
to love and hate
it is winter. Giant pines
are beholden to
white.
There's a fleck of red cardinal
like a spot of wine
spilled on desolation.
We
turn
toward it
because of our elation
and fury at the ease
of the spectacular.
In
the woods,
we see branches jut
like knife handles
and we're so close
to pulling
them from tree sheaths.
We are almost swayed to sing
a fugitive hymn of the
brook.
Instead, we skirt
necklace of barbed wire,
listen to the distant
train
admonish.