Sample Poems by Susan Elbe
At My Mother's Bedside
Bony hull and sunken wreckage, she sits
propped up by pillows , hands folded
like a splintered bow across her swollen stomach,
her thinned hair, skull cap of dune grass.
I stand next to her, my throat an ocean shell
filled up with sand, with everything
I don' t know how to say. This room, a seine
float, wavery with limit ation. Here, now,
life starts to blur, warps like fish under water.
Outside, voices of my playmates yap joy
in early autumn. I am eight years old, learning
that no matter how much life is left for me,
its exquisite green glass will always be distorted--
death, a dark meniscus of salty water leaching in.
Thanksgiving, 1954
The morphine light of afternoon November
angles down through basement windows
where my aunt hangs wash on lines strung
taut below the bedroom where my mother lies.
My aunt is 18, looking toward her weddi ng
in July, wanting to be done with soiled pajamas ,
sweat-soaked bedclothes, done with all of this.
Through the floor, she hears frayed breathing,
used up as old sheets. At the washboar d,
my grandmother, her knuckles red and raw,
leans into it with both hands, calml y says
death rattle. The rickety blues of dusk start
to ladder up the sky. Feeling only fear, my aunt,
keeps hanging wash as long as the light lasts.
Some Music
Across the room, a group of 20-somethings,
winding down their pasta dinners,
discover you can fret your finger on the rim
making even cheap wine flutes complain.
At first, annoying, an assault on ears,
but later like the reel whine
when a line is cast and catches sun,
its bright wick whipped against a sky so blue
it hurts, reminding me of fishing with my father,
slap of lemon water on the boat's hull,
bluegills flopping in the bucket , arc of
laughter from the near shore,
my mother 's death below the surface, that
perfect pitch of childhood vibrating in the gut.
Love, A Definition
Because I trusted him.
That' s why on that October
night, I left my body. When I looked down, our
shoulders touchi ng seemed as frail as cobwebs,
our white napes, smooth slim vases. He ran into a
field, one arm thrown wide, his hand a pale cane
tappi ng at the membrane of this world, calling me
across the well- deep dark that I stepped through,
glad to be inside again, stumbling blind on rough
ground.