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Five Poems
by Deborah Reich



Orphan at Four

In the beginning I was just an orphan & I married a Lewis
(they're an old family around here)

We come in every afternoon around four & have a piece of pie &
coffee
Best pie around

They thought of, I was not in the shirt, a woman with three breasts & a muffin

     "easily aroused
     "our lives begin
     "and then dispersed
     "of both visible
     "it was a vacation

     "new soft silk
     "a kiss involving. 

The roof of another person's thought
can be called into being, a woman with a shirt

we will dig it up
inspect & interpret

its lettering in flames, in names
my brink-eye, my sum, and three tits;

this is your bed & you're tired-
it's a clown's measure if not in terrains-

look at the shoes. And your laughing.
If you were not, or part of, or out of control,

without blanket or smile,
in fertile ground endearing,

a sacrificial son
a disk gleaming

a plate of people.

I was just an orphan
with three breasts

Best pie around.


A Bouquet of Dogs

In the beginning were words of one syllable,
An ask of spring or its ark;

If there were harm in hand, or telepathic tulips,
Under a grief, dead dogs sleep,

Rising each spring to bark daffodils;
I'd call it a lie; it's hiding itself in a border.

We're like snow, words of one syllable,
Side-slits in time, an ash of spring or its bark.

Teach me now, you harm-in-arm sweet,
how spring grows green overnight, how it

climbs into the future
which was once empty and is now
choked with eglantines, a box, a well,
tins of peaches, a partridge in a pear tree,
adversarial wolves;

a partridge in a pear tree,
a tin of peaches, a basket of
roses, a moon which was once
empty and is now overflowing; and
a bouquet of dogs.


The Degradation of Material Content

Two houses, head to head like hazelnuts -
it's an academy, one to study, one to clean up,

things not ready to be born left out to die.
Suppose there's nothing left for us, then what?

Art swings joyously from bough to fraud,
hums like deception waiting to be born.

What level of sensation is thought?

You are bored & the keeper lets it happen:
boy, girl, poppies & willow;

the space between arrival & departure
stretches & contracts accordingly.

Sworn, she said, notes for a later landscape;
there is much about us that matters -

for now, the ark door remains shut & old women
rest their tired breasts on the sill.

Silence fills up with washing,
cadences of bare sweet light.


Pear Blossom

heavy hair & intimate,
naked; a small sadness,

short rain, a little kissing;
she gave him a small

naked & it was a vacation
all throughout her body & it persisted.


Writing on the Wall

Climbing the hill may be visible,
they will try to do it. I'm ready.

Or would tomorrow be better?

Perhaps you're not ready -
from some points of view, tomorrow is a right angle.

Stars, newly born, lease &
lapse, surface on all sides;

tomorrow it could be 90 degrees or zero,
the exact reading doesn't matter -

lines falling out of the poem
remain to be endured.