Suzanne Edgar: Five Poems

The Temptation

I hope I’ll never try

to imitate my mother’s way of death:

her low despairing cry,

 

perhaps a choking; the leaving behind of breath

to sink in soft pillows

and become a thing changed, like nothing on earth;

 

her cold room in an odd way hollow

after she failed to rouse or react.

Hope I never use pills like those she swallowed

 

to cheat the one who’d broken their pact

and was stopped in his tracks at her door

by the undeniable fact:

 

no gunshot wound or blood on the floor,

only a terrible odour of absence;

then words ringing, iron on stone, when he swore.

 

Suzanne Edgar

 

 

Millais Does Shakespeare in Winter

The famous artist used his lissom model

to paint the maid Ophelia on a stream

with willows overhanging all its banks.

He was driven by his vision to begin

 

but how would he depict the watery scene?

He laid sweet Lizzie Siddall in a bath

with lamps beneath the tub to keep her warm.

Her palms upturned, she floated, fully clothed.

 

So obsessed was Millais by his task

he quite forgot to notice how time passed.

Five hours flew by and each oil lamp burned out

before he freed his model from the pose.

 

Drenched and numb, the uncomplaining girl

failed to recover from her long ordeal.

Pneumonia followed; though Millais paid the bills,

a stain remained to shadow her short life.

 

The drowned Ophelia lives for us today,

her story and her songs still tell the tale

while no one cares for damaged Lizzie now,

that victim of too literal a mind.

 

 

Nonsense, Early Morning

That old half-moon is slow and sly

wanting, while waning, high in the sky

as bosomy curves of clouds glide by

with a “You’ll never catch us, watch us fly!

 

“We are the ones with lustful thighs

but we have other fish to fry.”

Sadly the moon slid down the sky

as the clouds sashayed off with the old glad eye

 

for the sun, as it rose in the brightening sky.

Where the moon had failed, the sun was spry

and never the one to be backward or shy—

those wanton clouds were all sucked dry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

True Minds

Oh, there was no impediment at all

when you observed, inquired, and looked for me,

joking with my friends in the lecture hall.

Just then I was footloose and fancy free,

quite well equipped for study of your charms:

watching your lips, so mobile, warm and full,

I somehow sensed I’d never come to harm.

What’s more, you had this winning trick, a playful

way of singing relevant snatches of song

at any time of day or moonlit night.

That spring, when side by side we walked along

a river track with the bluest hills in sight,

I knew the time had come to see if we

could prove the worth of love’s slow chemistry.

 

 

 

Piano Ensemble

These magpies on the windowsill

are our familiar birds

and listen when my husband plays

a song with lilting chords.

 

One of them, old Bing by name,

who loves a smoochy tune,

fluffs his feathers into a ruff

as if about to croon.

 

Instead he drops a glistening plop

from coyly lowered bum

then warbles off a bar or two

a sort of magpie hum.

 

Suzanne Edgar