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Alice Friman
Reverie
1.
November’s deluge
plasters the leaves to the ground
in layers, wetting them down
for pliability then for packing.
Making room.
All
last week’s crisp flying—
those plucky gliders—wet as wet
laundry now, tired as refugees.
The earth will take them all.
There’s always room at that inn.
Autumn after autumn.
Funny how one never gets tired, pressed
to the window, watching, the way
you would a favorite movie. Gene Kelly
still singing in the rain.
2.
Singing in the rain,
autumn is alto. And didn’t Shelley
say the same? A woman of a certain age, wide
and golden at the girth who each year
emerges from the green screens of summer
to show us her dress before
allowing the wind to take it, little
by little, off.
Today she’s wearing
my Japanese maple. A red glory
lifting a thousand kisses to the rain. A silk
kimono so loosely tied, you can almost hear
her singing as it slides off.
Listen—
a cello hums in the heartwood, your mother
or mine, moaning on death’s baronial bed.
3.
Moaning? I hear no moaning. Today’s
rain keeps me inside, deaf by window
and blurry blinded. What a relief.
Rilke’s scenery of departure
too bright this year. The gorgeousness too
gem-cut, too desperate, flooding the eye
with news too piercing to bear. Each tree
a four-alarm fire quivering for
attention. How all occasions do
inform against me. Just when I think
I can take no more, there’s another
shrug off a stem, a last little sour
grape before the letting go. Last chance
to deliver, going, going, gone.
ALICE FRIMAN has poems published in many reviews. Her new collection
of poems is The Book of the Rotten Daughter from BkMk Press.
She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is poet in residence
at Georgia College & State University.
“Reverie” appears in our Spring
2007 issue.
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