By Barbara Sweeney

In the great stories of love
written by men
a man always comes to the rescue
just in time –
just when the girl is about to
die and awful death or marry
a man with black hair.

Archetype, unexhausted
by the paunchy denials of middle age,
lean into these limbs.
Tell me all kinds of gauzy lies.
Be my island man,
my adventurous tide
to a place where the air is soft,
teeth are white,
and fish are friendly.
Where native women speak a gentle tongue
and tolerate me
because of your fair hair.

Your mastery of the physical world
would ensure a roof carefully thatched,
a floor expertly woven from reeds.
There would be coconuts and quiet bells,
and wine, and eventually
I would quit drinking coffee,
forget my pride,
and, fluid and unshod,
learn to work with my hands.

Heart, rainbow, shell,
sand as white a fingernail moon,
the currency of fairytales flowing between us,
ours would be a place without boredom, fatigue,
or the longing for children.
Round as a bowl,
safe as a spoon,
green shade and pales stones
rimming our lagoon,
here an island’s perfect fruit would grace our afternoons:
fragrant, unreachable, ripe.

By Barbara Sweeney

To soften them,
she soaks corn husks
in the bathtub overnight.
She grinds chilies to a brilliant paste
to fold with meat and masa
into pale yellow packages
tied with tiny husk bows.
She stacks them in her Saturday pot
like rows of Spanish prayers
to the Sunday Virgin.

On a bleached coast
halfway around the world from Dublin,
her kitchen steams with maize, warms
her daughters, their hair
the color of corn.
Appeared in The Arroyo Arts Council
“Poetry in the Windows”
May, 2003

By Barbara Sweeney

It is a dress to be worn
by a free woman
in the black before dawn, liquid cool
and open down the back,
scented with the smell of heat
rising from stones.

It is silk in shifting patterns,
floor-length, ungathered, unadorned,
a dress that catches crystal
in its wake and shatters it,
and the shattering is sudden
and loud.

It is a chilled glass of a gown
cut for quenching the narrow moons
of prediction and reason,
stitched strong for dancing
out a strange, hot season,
looked forward to, whispered after.

Appeared in The American Scholar;
Summer 1998

By Barbara Sweeney

As we get older we turn
smaller circles.
A slice of toast and four
ripe berries can fill our breasts
with reasons.

As we get older the world turns
on tinier gears.
Small tugging faces
take over the dark.

Appeared in Yankee Magazine, March 1979

By Barbara Sweeney
Every year he brought them down
to the village square
of our slippered Republican town:
real lambs for a flesh and blood nativity.
In the lifesize stable, a real Mary
was paired with a real Joseph,
who stood shivering
in his burlap robe.
Requisite angels brought forth
their music in the cold Connecticut night,
and Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar
knelt like snow dome statues
next to a couple of borrowed cows
and Edgerton’s lambs.

It was the beginning of religion for me.
The dumb animals, steam
puffing from their nostrils,
standing bunched and puzzled on a pile of straw.
And Edgerton,
our affable, bow-tied neighbor,
tweaking his wire-rim glasses,
tugging his grey twill pants up high
above his real waist.
Stable, steam, straw, star.
What was real gave shape
to what we wished for.
A perfect baby, a saving god,
real kings.

By Barbara Sweeney

Rainbow snake, the trout coils
around my plate.
Peel back the papery skin:
lift the cloudy plan of a head
with its eyes like rain.
Pull out the ancient
familiar skeleton.

The fish is friendly
with its pink flesh, frightening
with its bending mesh of clear-cut
beginnings and ends.
This morning, history blends
with tarragon, lemon and cream.
And it swims.

By Barbara Sweeney

At twilight, the mans begins
digging the shallow grave.
His young daughter sits hunched close by,
watching her father in the garden
as she has so many times before:
planting carrots, pruning roses,
feeding the trees.
She questions each wordless shovelful
with a slim, serious voice, “Daddy,
are you very sad?”, and,
“Can I show my friends?”
Her blonde head is a point of light,
white against piles of earth
and a darkening sky.
“I really do want to show my friends”, she says,
and makes her deliberate way next door.

When she’s gone, the man places the heavy animal
in the ground, throwing dirt
back into the hole,
breathing hard, sweating at the task.
Finished, he rakes a few even lines
over the gentle mound.
Soon the girl returns, “He’s so dead
you won’t believe it,”
she advises her older friends, she,
now an authority
on things of other worlds.

The children stand quietly
in the moonless garden.
Hand in hand, they stare
at their shoes,
at the earth,
at the man.
They see the chores that loss forces us to take.
They see love lean over a rake
and look closely at the ground
to see if it moves.

Appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Summer/Fall 1996

By Barbara Sweeney

“I had expected to be more than this.  I had not expected to
be an ordinary woman.”
Lucille Clifton, 38th Year

You always know where to find me.
Sometimes I sit in a different chair,
but essentially things haven’t changed.
I would still accept
a Pulitzer Prize.
This year you’ve found me just returned
from a trip to Mexico distinguished
by four people from Cincinnati who snorted
nose drops in tandem.
I’ve started doing a sit-up for every year,
sweeping away termite wings
and duplicating the movements of women everywhere
as they fold clothes in the dark.
At night now, there are fewer cats
crunching in the mulberry leaves,
and stars blur in front of my first pair of glasses.
This year I stole old doors
for a new house.  I learned that
two-year-olds will spend hours
peeling white glue off their knees.

A captioned photo of an actor
in spats and a straightjacket hangs
in my kitchen.  It reads, “Get me
out of here.  I can make you rich and strong,
strong and rich.”
This year you’ve caught me lining up
my accomplishments into a row of minor works:
a crowd of birds on a piazza floor
hurrying across the tiles,
scrambling up the crumbs.

Appeared in The Malahat Review;
Number 63, October, 1982

By Barbara Sweeney

She pushes out over the bumpy pond,
the boots of her grandmother’s skates
worn through,
a fine-boned beauty,
willow thin,
hair pale as ash,
eyes the color of lake water
in late spring.
With arms outstretched, she sails
eyes shut into the wind.
Even from far off,
I know her eyelids still make
that blue veined map of the world
all mothers memorize from their sleeping children.

She skates to inner music,
Chopin’s Waltz in C# Major, maybe,
or Bach’s
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, piano pieces
she practices for hours on end,
slender hands sliding over the keys.
She carves figure eights
onto a smooth patch of black ice,
twirls over trout, twigs,
leaves — life frozen into place.
Abruptly she turns and cuts out
across the moaning lake, makes her way
around foot-thick plates of ice pushing up
into jagged planes.
She skates on for half a mile
before turning to freeze me in her frame.
She takes in her world
measure by measure,
as I mark her meters from the snowy shore,
keeping time.

By Barbara Sweeney

Tonight on the mountain
I am startled by the sheer
geometry of love.
Every angle assumes a desired shape.
The round-faced child
breathes softly from a goose down bag.
Moon-white fields of ashen flowers
jag into planes of snow.
Two dogs sit
squarely facing the dark.

And as the mountain cuts into
the circumference of moon,
there is your hand,
cracked and weathered from our climb,
connecting the points,
slanting toward water.

Appeared in The Climbing Art;
Vol. 29, 1996