lester

connected meanderings
2006-12-26 12:33:01 (UTC)

poem -- Cold Fingers

Cold Fingers

Cold fingers
Warm by touching shoulder-skin
Beneath my shirt and sweater in this energy-efficient house.

Outside a few colored lights.
Inside on a distant wall a family portrait, an ancestral
woman.
Venus de Milo’s photograph looks to a distance from a
bookshelf high above.

White Oleander
On my footstool tells of a humiliated mother then a killer.
Poison stewed from oleander left a daughter prison-orphaned.

My own mother
Loves the amaryllis I gave to her. It shows blood-red.
A twenty-five year old picture I did of Christmas time
shows icy-white,

Shows how she felt to me then, humiliated in some way, her
house unwelcome
To my visit overnight, and to the family I had sired.
Shoulder-warmed, my fingers tell this story.




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