10
" Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy"
Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover.
Metal stand. Instructions included. --Sears, Roebuck Catalogue
O my coy darling, still
You wear for me the scent
Of those long afternoons we spent,
The two of us together,
Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes
Of household spies
And the remote buffooneries of the weather;
So high,
Our sole remaining neighbor was the sky,
Which, often enough, at dusk,
Leaning its cloudy shoulders on the sill,
Used to regard us with a bored and cynical eye.
How like the terrified,
Shy figure of a bride
You stood there then, without your clothes,
Drawn up into
So classic and so strict a pose
Almost, it seemed, our little attic grew
Dark with the first charmed night of the honeymoon.
Or was it only some obscure
Shape of my mother’s youth I saw in you,
There where the rude shadows of the afternoon
Crept up your ankles and you stood
Hiding your sex as best you could?--
Prim ghost the evening light shone through. "
― Donald Justice , A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose
11
" Elsewheres
South
The long green shutters are drawn.
Against what parades?
Closing our eyes against the sun,
We try to imagine
The darkness of an interior
Where something might still happen:
The razor lying open
On the cool marble washstand,
The drip of something--is it water?--
Upon stone floors.”
-
North
Already it is midsummer
In the Sweden of our lives.
The peasants have joined hands,
They are circling the haystacks.
We watch from the veranda.
We sit, mufflered,
Humming the tune in snatches
Under our breath.
We tremble sometimes,
Not with emotion.
-
Waiting Room
Reading the signs,
We learn what to expect--
The trains late,
The machines out of order.
We learn what it is
To stare out into space.
Great farms surround us,
Squares of a checkerboard.
Taking our places, we wait,
We wait to be moved. "
― Donald Justice
14
" On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark will bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little Cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon
Naked to the naked moon. "
― Donald Justice
19
" [“This poem is not addressed to you”]
This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.
Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.
It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.
Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.
You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes without guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.
Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forget the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.
O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you. "
― Donald Justice , Collected Poems
