Turning Point

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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.