Barbara
Tomash
Cursive
Handwriting, a word in motion. Cursive
sounds like a curse. She enters
with folded laundry. As if I wake—
turquoise naugahyde sofa, stories
scribbled all over in ball-point
the sound of my voice tape recorded
fish feeding on the bottom of the aquarium
apple becoming persimmon
in the palm of my hand
•
Petite camera, no lens
for focus. Framed: chateaux, Rodins,
cone-shaped topiary. A man reaches
with his pruning shears. I need to know
where to stand
Hand,
I watch mine with a critical eye
her shiny, sharp scissors I took to things.
Example:
lace curtains
•
With a kleenex I try to rub my fingerprints
off the face of a woman
painted by Vermeer
the sunlight in 1663 materializes
something shadowed under the table
and they smear
•
It’s either too dark, or there’s
too much
glare. In front of the painting, I walk
in a semicircle until I feel two foot-shaped
declivities in the stone floor
the girl seated within the arched portico
of her
garden, her book fallen
the angel kneeling to speak
Barbara Tomash’s poems have appeared
in Colorado Review, New
American Writing, VOLT, Zyzzyva and
many others. Her book-length prose poem sequence, Flying
in Water (Winnow Press, 2005) won the
Winnow First Poetry Award. She lives in Berkeley
and teaches in the Creative Writing department
at San Francisco State University.
back
|
