3 Poems of the day- On Poety Daily

Three Poems
Elegy
Sixty years I've lived, hardly a cross word said!
(The carpenter found, behind their bed,
a crawl-space where black snakes had bred.)

Each of the Ten Commandments, I kept.
(Broom jabbing, she frantically swept
at filth that flowered while she slept.)

No one can ever say I told lies.
(She faded below her cracking disguise,
fixed as a dead-leaf butterfly's.)

I gave my love to each and all.
(Hoarded in a locked closet down the hall
hatreds muffled by a paisley shawl.)

I never let myself complain.
(Gallons of tears, a wet winter's rain,
whirled at the brim of the churning drain.)

I had the life I wanted to have.
(She stepped unborn into her grave.)

Chemo Side Effects: Vision
Gnats in dervish clouds,
indistinguishable, words fizzle.

Or keep fading in and
out of focus—
tiny climbers screened
in cheesecloth mist, sliding
along the oblong glacier.

Serifs ascending, descending,
I want to recognize all of you
even when you're a dozen to the pinhead—
f's fiddlehead fern,
hydrofoil dot balancing
on i's pilaster,
the diminutive compartments of a's, e's, p's,
beer-bellied cousins d and b.

But they clump,
a jumble of type
after the printer's apprentice upends
the basket. Impenetrable
as a playground clique,
schools of black fish foggily quivering
on silty beds. . . .

Eyes that have brought me so many words,
are you too dim for the world to keep courting?
Days, lay out your wares in the honking bazaar!

So many small things I still want to see:
sheen of my nephew's corner eyelash,
snowflake circuitry, fleas' thighs,
nebulae flocking in my husband's iris,
the peaks and valleys of each mustard seed.

World War II Watchtower
Squat concrete turret
furnished with gray pebbles
white-splatted by gulls.
Damp, fusty crests of sand;
bolts the size of a palm, rusted.

View: gold-spangled ocean, buoy-bells
ting-tinging.
Toylike twin-engines trail
ads for lotion.
Tourists dowse for coins, sift pink cockleshells.

After a day swinging horseshoe crabs—
tideline helmets—
the boys grab dinner: doughnuts, cigarettes,
whiffs of paint-thinner—
then crouch in these rough walls
and test their echoes.

Lost boys, don't bivouac here.
Gauge your luck, in the lighthouse-glare,
and go:

your open eyes aren't freckled with Omaha sand;
you're not the great-uncle bobbing at Juno.

Elise Partridge