Poetry Magazine, Feature Poet: Molly Peacock, Winter 2004-2005

Poetry Magazine

Molly Peacock

USA

Photo: Star Black

MOLLY PEACOCK, Poet-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is the author of Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Co. and by Penguin Canada). Among her other works are How To Read A Poem & Start A Poetry Circle (Riverhead Penguin Putnam / McClelland & Stewart) and a memoir, Paradise Piece By Piece (Riverhead Penguin Putnam / McClelland & Stewart). She is the editor of The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf) and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W. Norton).

MOLLY PEACOCK divides her time between Toronto and New York City. Born in Buffalo, New York, she received a B.A. magna cum laude from Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton), and an M.A. with honors from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University. Among her awards are Danforth Foundation, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry.

Former President of the Poetry Society of America, Peacock is one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on subways and buses throughout North America. Currently she is on the faculty of the Spalding University low residency Master of Fine Arts Program. She works with poets and writers throughout North America privately one-to-one. Peacock’s latest project is a one-woman monologue in poems, “The Shimmering Verge,” which she is performing throughout North America.

Of Night

A city mouse darts from the paws of night.
A body drops from the jaws of night.
A woman denies the laws of night,
Awake and trapped in the was of night.
A young man turns in the gauze of night,
Unravelling the cause of night:
That days extend their claws at night
To re-enact old wars at night,
Though dreams can heal old sores at night
And Spring begins its thaw at night,
While worry bones are gnawed at night.
He sips her through a straw at night.
Verbs whisper in the clause of night.
A finger to her lips,
the pause of night.

Boulevard Magazine

The Flaw

The best thing about a hand made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in your hand-loomed rug
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub will soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross will sneak up among
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong bit of floss
that wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turns that blue field into a sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.

River Styx magazine

Flashback

On Pearse Street in Dublin I saw a man
and a woman – short, squat, red-faced and drunk –
screaming at each other in the August sun,
and all I had built, the pillars I thought I’d sunk
into a new foundation became matchsticks
blown aloft over the ugly street, and that man,
egged on by the woman, would get his licks
in soon, I knew, though my calm husband
hardly noticed them. Then my beloved,
my pillar, began to catch flame
like paper, a red piece of tissue paper
dancing beside me, then aloft, near
but not graspable. No hand to hold near.
That couple was my dead parents fighting,
my husband taken off by the wind.

Anticipation

When anticipation fizzes from my roots,
I’m not able to help how it loots my reason.
I can’t tamp down its power –
something’s going to happen!
My human body becomes a flower.
But it leads to disappointment, of course.
Sometimes all the energy I put toward
the imaginary orchid of my reward
fizzles simply from being brought forward.
But is something dead in the bud so frightening
I won’t allow myself another goal?
Even as an awful week runs its course,
the unseen inches through the stem of days
and bursts out as Saturday morning.

Credit: The National Poetry Review
in which this poem appeared in an earlier version

Gently Waiting
for Phillis Levin

Gently waiting and attending. Patience.
Now a gift will be delivered. Her food
from her hands. Her shoulders. All the good
little dishes assembled and friendship hence
ever so slightly adjusted in level.
No one grows evenly. One surges. One lags.
But here comes a resting point. All
focus on a platter: two sole almost wag
their tails, so happy are they to be served.
Lovely. Yes, lovely. Thank you. Pleasure
crosses and re-crosses making cursive
loops as if written on paper, a measure
of lines made by our lives as they swerve by
as if making letters, each meal a missive.

Boulevard Magazine