Martha Bove
2 Poems
Cover Art: Nomathemba Tana, You will indeed be clever to come through fire with water. 2000. Linoleum cut. MOMA
Sleepwalking in San Luis Obispo
You’re watching the waves
beat the land sleeplessly as they always have, engineering continents, chiseling escarpments, throwing themselves at the moon only to retreat, teasing the Earth’s mud-red heart. Waiting on the motel roof in the dark, staring out into the late opaque chill, you have to blink: over tracts of splintered tide, ships are coming. Natives appear from night-fishing beneath cliffs, now climbing the clefts so fast you can hardly distinguish their bare hides from mountain lions. And even before you know the ships will wreck, blood’s copper stench rises into your nostrils like a foreshadowed mourning. Now the night sounds its guttural collapse and you know the visions aren’t finished with you: William Hearst’s zebras-- who weren’t meant to breed-- stampeding off the edge in striped coats, flying like extraterrestrial creatures over the foundering boats. |
Midwest Dark
The prairies have retired, senescent and hunchbacked.
Below the dirt, wood frogs keep quiet and groundhogs sleep. Deer nose beneath park benches for grass in a darkness that lingers late into morning. Nothing much grows but footprints and hoofs outlined in snow. Trees close their chapter. Pines alone hold on staring out at what’s razed. Like lovers, they have remained side-by-side, wearing white death much better than sun. But soon, their stiff sleep and frost will subside. Forgotten rhizomes and tubers trace roots to the surface. Dark hyacinth bulbs will resurrect in reptilian colors, undoing winter’s pale sanctity. Woolly sleepers will wake. Veined stems will stretch under Spring’s warm wave. And the gypsum moon, no longer hanging low, will drop like a vial and scatter its bright shards, shattering the lantern-glow, rearranging in an unthinkable burn-- |
Martha Bove is a poet currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She nannies and tutors children, is a freelance calligrapher, teaches painting at a local art studio, and lives with her husband John in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
past, Sarah Bigham next, Sarah Kernsey