POETRY MONDAY – October 4, 2010
Elizabeth Socolow
Elizabeth Socolow has published two full-length volumes of poetry. Her first, a stunning debut, was Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton, awarded the Barnard New Women Poets’ Prize in 1987. Her second book, Between Silence and Praise, was published by Ragged Sky Press in 2006. Along the way, her work has continued to appear in national and international publications, including the Wayzgoose Anthologies and the Windsor Review in Windsor, Canada. She was a winner of a poetry contest in CV2, Canada’s premier poetry magazine, as well as a poetry prize from Isotope, a journal of science and art formerly published by the University of Utah. Her poetry has also earned her two fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
A teacher of high school and college students for more than thirty years, Socolow now works with senior citizens at the Suzanne Patterson Senior Resource Center in Princeton, where she teaches courses in the reading of poetry in some historical or thematic frame, different each semester. Recently she returned to a field she had not revisited since earning her doctorate at Harvard almost fifty years ago; after a morning walk along the Griggstown towpath, she goes home to write poems and essays about Tudor and Stuart England, which we hope will appear in her next book. But for now, here are three others, also recent and unpublished.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
The Tree Standing
The balance of it
and its height and breadth,
the way I had the arbor men feed it all those years,
and they called it the most beautiful
and largest birch in three counties,
the spread of its shade though yearly
I trimmed all the lowest branches
so I could string the badminton net for the children
the pride I felt–even knowing it was not mine–
when it was praised,
the lift at raking all its always yellow leaves in fall,
the joy at its strength in winter and in storms,
so that when the hurricane force winds came through this year,
almost a decade after I sold the house,
which in some sense, perhaps, I did own,
I feared and did not go down that street for days.
When I took heart telling myself a former neighbor
might have phoned to say something had
gone wrong, if it had,
it stood as it always had, tall, and broad and unperturbed
and I did something like pray for an earlier time,
when children still screamed in the raked yellow chaos
and I fed cats and a certain hope I see I have let go
as I moved to this other place
where I do not know the trees as individuals
though some mornings I see a sudden
streak of light describe a parabola
in one of the high specimens in unleafed spring.
So swift the movement, I know it is Life, and am glad,
and only recognize Squirrel and Tail
not because I can see what races
gray in gray branches, but because
I have been told.
The Market at Union Square
There is no market for this hunger
in the city of my yearning
where tomatoes and cider,
honey and poinsettias,
gloves and onions,
bread and cured pork
are sold from stalls.
The wind blows them over
scattering donuts and scarves,
oranges, peppers, lettuce,
poles that pounded, awning rings clanging–
the sound of small metal on cobblestone
while I starve.
The fragrance of soup
complex as a symphony
bursts on the street.
I need easier shoes to keep walking.
This place of early memory
calls me home.
Here I would buy detergent,
spread cheer in winter,
food, carefully chosen,
delicately cooked.
The trees are bare as a wrist,
the sky bluer than veins, the clouds
assertive as ear muffs on a child.
Dogs on leashes and one, black and white,
I can hear clicking its nails
yards away, crossing the street,
its whole small weight
bounds in air at each step,
leading its master,
landing hard.
There is no replacement for that dog,
its affectionate connection and sprightly walk.
I cannot put a cat in the place of the dog.
I cannot put the hawk there that authorities
chased from its ledge.
I cannot subtly override it
with my childhood dog,
lower to the ground,
or higher and larger.
I cannot substitute the music
of Handel for the Bach I heard that night.
Taming means this particularity
and no other belongs to my hope.
Beware letting it happen;
it lasts forever. You are with me
as I listen. See, the husband’s face
is always rapt when he watches
his wife play the flute.
I wait for her hunger after concerts,
and his attention to which food
might fill the expression
she has given out,
generous, practiced,
natural as fruit on a strong tree.
He answers it by a treat
of perfect frites, veal, wine–
a French bistro around the corner
from the morning’s disaster
at the market, wind died down,
funneled into music in a silver pipe.
Sometimes As I Take My Morning Pills
I imagine the water and the contours of my throat
so deeply that I cannot possibly have the pellets
miss their path, get stuck, logjam, gag me,
and as I enter concentration that profound
some random scene on a Paris balcony
arises, the coffee and hot milk, the apricot jam
on crisp baguette, butter fresh and sweet, not salt.
Not something to mention to anyone else
but so joyous a simple sign of breakfast coming
after pills, the usual arrangements of a life,
mute gratitude accompanies memory
and then a rush of seeing.
I wonder if it is this way
with anyone else, the tender attention to a beloved’s
simplest actions, the way the bread falls into hand
or head jerks back in swallowing a pill.
The lure, the fascination the least gesture holds
the way sportscasters analyze the batter’s foot
or wielded bat held still, or circling.
A tennis partner I adored would tilt his left hip
out on smashing down a serve, which even casual
observers spoke about. But, without
the radio voice of the announcers, I do not notice
any of those punctuating signs in play or on TV.
There has to be the love, that attachment
and connection for me to see distinction closely.
And being this alone this long, sometimes, I have
found myself, as I concentrate on getting down
the pills without event, imagining the glance
of someone watching me, an imagined lover –
that much tenderness and interest, and I blush,
the occasion full of significance and without a hitch.