Poetry Magazine, Mildred Taylor, March 2001

Poetry Magazine

Mildred Taylor

USA

Mildred Taylor is a retired teacher who is now a free lance writer and poet. She graduated from Seton Hill College with a B.A. in English and from the University of Pittsburgh with a master's degree in education. She has been focusing on writing poetry for four years. She has had poems in The Loyalhanna Review and The Potters Wheel. She writes for Westsylvania magazine. Mildred is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Society and the Pennsylvania Poetry Society.

Treatments

(for Kent Osborne, my best friend's brother)

I can only think the agony of it:

radiated skin scorched beyond blisters

where your mind chooses chemicals

and their volcanic searing on the inside

as a lesser pain.

For six months after

the calculated chase of cutting

to extract the killer roots

came the two other treatments

to bludgeon the bad cells from

crabbing through your blood, bones,

glands, bobbling them up.

Now the pause:

three months before the final scanning

to see if there will be time

for you to take the time to drive

to the country road you remember,

turn onto the rocky rumble so the car

bumps like a wild pony.

You stop, step into the silver silence,

walk slowly through the field of

goldenrod, thistles, daisies.

A hawk's hanging glide catches your eye,

halts your stride, holds your heart

until it opens like a hand with an earned ease

of one who knows this is the best there is.

Momma after the Chase

After the chase,

she corners me in the pantry

against the back wall

between the two side-walls of shelves.

Panting from running, I laugh.

She starts with the switch,

a razor-thin willow branch she keeps

where I can never find it.

The first swipe stops my laughter.

Back and forth

across the front of my legs

again and again

I feel the crisscross of red pain,

the hot veins of strings

that will not, will not

open the lips of my silence

as pinheads of blood ooze from the welts

of my stubbornness.

I bit my bottom lip,

a fight against tears,

my courage seepsing away in trickles

down my legs.

My eyes brim, salt burns my throat,

and all at once she knows

the core of me cannot be bled away.

There will always be the shelves

neatly lined with cans, pots, pans,

the musk of flour, dust, fury,

the whiz, hiss, whir of the whip,

the child of nine who does not understand why words

as straight as arrows are cut over and over

until finally she stops.

There is no pain left,

but there will always be

my rock-solid truth

and her unforgiving rage

as she turns and leave me there

slamming the door after her.

Ships that Touch

She is a freighter collecting cargo.

With short gray hair clumped like algae

and watery blue eyes,

she is a wash of despair.

Her sand-colored coat is stained

with the gray, brown, and black

islands and continents of her past life,

as if her oceans held no color.

She places each item

on the conveyor belt

as if each thing were heavy as chain.

Things flow in slow motion

including the check out girl

who understands as the takes

the food stamps, loads the bags,

and puts them in the car.

Time snaps to full speed,

and I buy my food.

I spy the lady again

circling around and around

the front of the store

as if looking for a port.

I pause beside her, ask if anything is wrong.

She stops, tells me she cannot

find her car. At customer service

they call the police,

and I feel that I have kept

an appointment that I did not make.

Finding a Voice

In the cement-walled church that lifts eyes up, up

with Gothic arches of windows, niches, vaults,

each higher than the other, I stand to sing a hymn

I do not know at the funeral of my brother-in-law's mother.

I tighten myself again the family's grief because

my mother lives.

I pick-up quickly on the hymn because

I ear a melody well. My voice is an octave lower.

Soprano is too high, my sounds fade and thin to air.

Also means harmony, and my voice turns to gravel

at blending. So my voice muddles in the

middle of a place alone and lost.

But here as sun spills through space

with unexpected force

and the organ thunders unblemished sound,

I sing with a sudden intensity of pitch,

a sure sense of strength,

my voice clean and pure as rain

cleansing trees, rocks, earth,

until all things shine.

I am caught in the articulation

of the song with holy words

reaching that high ceiling

and touching here where I find my voice.

Millennium March Night

Early March.

Fish hook moon

bright as polished silver.

The sky is Homer's wine-dark sea

as deep as high can be.

The wind rumbles.

Empty branches scratch

their veins against the ink of space.

An owl hoots,

These night things stir

me awake

to the earth's rounding certainty

fresh and pure as melted snow.

Tonight is an etching

fragile as glass

before the world goes green

and becomes

reality in a place I have been

in a time I have not lived.

Wishes like Feathers

I would there be just enough rain

to glisten feathers, feed the fields,

calm the restless, fill the lakes.

I would there be smiles

with a nod when a child

spills his milk, loses his hat.

I would there be no misplaced lives

with hot hearts

and hands holding guns.

I would there be no lined lips

from thirst, no clawing bellies

from hunger, no eyes seeking shelter.

I would lovers entering the rest of the lives

understand the exactness of love

as they pull down cool, smooth sheets.

I would there be eyes that delight in quiet meadows,

ears that ring with many songs,

voices that speak truth in plain sentences.

I would that these wishes float like feathers

to the clouds, slide through the vault of sky,

drift down and touch each of us as possibilities.