If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
Memorial: Blanche Chaiken
(March 10, 1922 - January 19, 2003)
by Ellen Halter
You found me
on the near side of childhood.
Your brow,
arched like a spade,
plunged through topsoil
to the secret garden
of my heart,
trillium running through it.
Your retinue
of nine-year olds,
sailed with you
after school,
through the projects,
its mean grid
of concrete and brick,
to the library.
Port of entry,
its bay and lagoon,
underwater dives,
we'd surfaced
late afternoon,
the sun in our eyes.
Out-of-focus,
blurred,
memory
I believe.
Ramrod as a mast,
regal as a queen,
you trod abroad,
toeing outward
away from me.
You, my dear,
interred,
bones to dust,
I can’t conceive.
Dumb to the love of the child,
deaf to the poet’s pleas,
To please,
please,
heed.
You there,
deferred,
a mirage,
I retrieve.
My shoulders squared,
my eyebrows raised,
readied to proceed.