Poetry Magazine, Susan Rich, Winter 2006

Poetry Magazine

Susan Rich

USA

Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN West Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for her book, The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World, White Pine Press, 2000. Her new book, Cures include Travel will be published by White Pine Press, October 2006.Rich has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia, and a human rights trainer in Gaza.
Her work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Magazine, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, and Witness. Anthologized poems and essays are included in Best Essays of the Northwest; O Taste and See: Food Poems; South African Poets on Poetry 1992-2001; To Touch the World: the Peace Corps Experience; and Voices From the Field: Peace Corps. She is a founding member of the Somali Rights Network, a non-governmental organization, an alum of Cottages at Hedgebrook, and an editor at Floating Bridge Press. The
poems included on PoetryMagazine.com are from her new book, Cures Include Travel.
Visit her at http://www.susanrich.org

For Sale

Xhosa women in clothes too light
for the weather have brought wild flowers
and sit sloped along the Claremont road.
I see her through rolled windows,

watch her watch me to decide if I’ll pay.
It’s South Africa, after all, after apartheid;
but we’re still idling here, my car to her curb,
my automatic locks to her inadequate wage.

© Susan Rich
First published by Water~Stone

A Poem for Will, Baking

Each night he stands before
the kitchen island, begins again
from scratch: chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg,
he beats, he folds;
keeps faith in what happens
when you combine known quantities,
bake twelve minutes at a certain heat.
The other rabbis, the scholars,
teenagers idling by the beach,
they receive his offerings,
in the early hours, share his grief.
It’s enough now, they say.
Each day more baked goods to friends,
and friends of friends, even
the neighborhood cops. He can’t stop,
holds on to the rhythmic opening
and closing of the oven,
the timer’s expectant ring.
I was just baking, he says if
someone comes by. Again and again,
evenings winter into spring,
he creates the most fragile
of confections: madelines
and pinwheels, pomegranate crisps
and blue florentines;
each crumb to reincarnate
a woman – a savoring
of what the living once could bring.

© Susan Rich
First published by Prism International, Issue # 18

If You Could Lick My Heart

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you,
If you could click your long white coated tongue
Along the contours of what we didn't pursue,

Nullify the body with oleander, nightshade, yew;
What would you do with so much leading towards none?
If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

Come, count the ways I've curtained the pain from view.
One, with an art for surviving, two, with a morning run
Pounding the contours of what we didn't pursue.

Rest assured, there's nothing you can do,
Not tears, nor sex, nor donations in large sums.
If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

It's finished now, this field guide of purples and blues,
Which recorded each proof, a fable barely begun ---
Held along the contours of what we didn't pursue.

The truth be damned - you were too weak to choose,
Between a luminous life, and the other, safer one.
If you could lick my heart it would poison you
Along the contours of what we might still pursue.

© Susan Rich
First published in Crab Orchard Review

Note: “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you,” is a line from
Claude Landsmann’s “Shoah” spoken by one of the leaders of the Warsaw
Uprising in the aftermath of World War II.

At the Corner of Washington and Third

– Garden Room balcony

You could start your life over, sitting here
believe only in roses,

blue oleander, an orange lily.

Clean white table with rocking chair
would be enough.

Early morning, now
the self returns to the self.

One pear scone, decanter of tea –
and the world appears terribly healthy.

In the rise of river light

open palms of poplar trees
barn swallows state swallow beliefs.

No terrorist in sight.

To the right of the fish pond
the cat claims a gray stone for her own.

The hardest thing of all

would be to choose
your own life.

***

© Susan Rich
First published in Cranky, Winter 2006

December Journal Entry

Perhaps consider poetry
a gourmet grocery shop,

endless pyramids of
shape-shifting fruit:

persimmon, star flower, pomegranate –

and across the aisle
in hand-woven oval baskets:

Vietnamese coriander,
Thai basil, Chinese leaves.

Experiment without knowing
the exact region where

the pomegranate is grown
the pronunciation of the Chinese leaf.

But don’t set out to deceive
the check-out girl;

you can’t pretend that you’re
a kumquat or a chanterelle.

And get away with it.

Instead, practice rapture –
and inquisitiveness, pose

a question to the golden
beet, the artichoke heart;

engage with a yellow fin.
The page relies

on the clean attempt
to move beyond the safe way.

Where is the ineffable?

Bring home a mango
prepare it with Kosher salt.

***

© Susan Rich
First published in 5 AM, Issue 18

Church

You can’t know if there will be rewards
for clearing out weeds, for the commonplace
work of turning the soil, composting

long rows begun in faith, then clarity.
And when the volunteers appear, half obscured
in shrubbery and shade, scattered beneath

blue birdbaths, you’ll rescue those that resemble
a tribe of unemployed tightrope-walkers
attempting awesome feats. You’ll offer

driftwood, grasses, lemon
drinks, while at night the young
raise their three-pronged wings.

Pruning, thinning, feeding, you imagine
a life replete with wild berries, cream.
O, the heart is a repository of terrestrial things.

© Susan Rich
Forthcoming in Cures Include Travel