Colette Inez
Colette Inez has published ten books of poetry and received Guggenheim, Rockefeller and two NEA fellowships and Pushcart prizes. She is widely anthologized and taught at Columbia University for many years. Her shocking, beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of long-held secrets and a child’s resilience, The Secret of M. Dulong, (University of Wisconsin Press) appeared in 2005. A new collection, The Luba Poems, will be published late next year by Red Hen Press, which has announced that she will be honored with a newly established Colette Inez Poetry Prize, to be administered by the Academy of American Poets and awarded annually to a graduate student of the City College of New York.
We’re especially proud to feature this wonderful poet for the holiday season with three of her poems. The first two appeared in the 2011 Saranac Review; the third, FOMALHAUT, is published here for the first time.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Three Poems by Colette Inez
LADY OF THE MOON
you ask us to believe in the rabbit who swears
to uphold your decrees.
We your petitioners under silken quilts
long for the hare’s smooth fur
here in dawn’s red room
Brushing ghostly quills of snow you aver
no one may steal what you master
though daylight, that bandit with hammer
and tongs dismantles your palace,
and we are laid low with bowls of fog
at a bare table scrawling mournful poems.
MOON GODDESS CHANG O
AND THE MAN ON THE MOON
She considers her first words
to the holy astronaut in his bubble mask.
“Unknown frontier,” he answers a question
she doesn’t ask.
“I’m Neil and I’ve come in a ship.”
“Waking and dream are one,”
she speaks out of the abyss
of her orbiting alone.
“I represent America,” he plants
a foot in basalt dust.
Chang O, Pale Empress of clouds,
in her white silk robe, kneels to him
that he might stay, offers to teach him
Mandarin words for kiss and eclipse.
“I’ll take a giant leap,” he says.
FOMALHAUT
(One of the Four Royal Persian Stars)
I used to say Fo ma lo until corrected:
“no, it’s Fo ma laht,” laht, a sound not so
alluring as that long terminal o.
October: molecules of student back packs, cell phones,
laptops, Broadway, Manhattan, once a glacial field,
a terminal moraine, all descended from star grit.
My breath may or may not fan the smoke of words.
Fading through library doors are waves of things said
that leave their residue of concerns.
Where are we from? When we surrender
who we are, where is our oblivion? I gaze up
at The Southern Fish, invisible constellation setting down
its kettle of fire – Fomalhaut, “The Solitary One,””
17th among the 20 brightest stars.