Elizabeth Volpe

Just Another Island on the Way to Ithaca

Circe has been weaving so long now that her hands know

nothing else, not how to shuck oysters nor

filet fish. So she weaves and weaves

while the sty fills.  She knows the men had pictured plump

cushions, lotus tea, dark smooth cakes when,

battle-weary, they’d pushed through

the thick island branches, all thoughts of home

exiled, chests strong from the rigors of combat

and sea, legs young, ears honeyed

by the songs of the goddess at her loom. So she plied

her threads while they came on, her fingers knowing

when to tug, when to loosen, their chests high,

necks pulsing. She hummed, they plunged forward,

the burning bodies of Ilium

part of them now. They’d conquered

and stormed, she’d weaved.

She doesn’t lift her head at the sounds

from the sty—such indignant grunting and snuffling

you would think the men didn’t belong there

among the goats, the blathering sheep.

                        Wool heaps to the floor around her

feet. She loves the soft arrhythmia

of its tumbling. She’s been called heartless, but look

at these colors sliding

through her fingers, watch the scents rising

from the loom—sage, cinnamon,

rosemary. Listen

to the weft and warp of her designs

as they fall and fall, the wooly thickness

never enough to muffle the beefy cries.

The Color of Paradise

            after the film of the same name, Iran, 2000

He cannot see. The boy waits

for his father, has been waiting

the whole day, the other children long reclaimed.

He sits on the bench, his ears engaged

in the drama of squirrels and acorns, the peep

of a sparrow chick. The boy climbs off the bench, kneels,

feels his way off the hard path. His fingers read

the fallen leaves, the fallen

bird. The boy takes the flailing bird to his breast

pocket. His palms lead the way

up the tree. Small chirps guide him

to the nest where he fits

the family together.

At the entrance to the school for the blind, the father

has been watching. Now he takes the boy by the wrist,

yanks him along the blue-shadowed road

toward home. The boy’s cheek inclines to sky,

his ear registers the drum of woodpeckers, whirr

of insects. His lips whisper the alphabet of feathers,

each sheaf of wheat.

His feet know the way through these Persian fields

of sword lily, heavy blue poppy the way fingers read

the wind, the Braille of pond pebbles, toward the great kettles

where his sittu and sisters boil gathered flowers

to make dye. They have told him that colors look like the songs

of birds. Perhaps he is thinking of this when he falls

through the slatted bridge, tastes the thunder

of the rapids that curl around him.

The father watches as the river reads

the boy’s face, his blue shirt, his fine long fingers.

He watches his son tossed and tossed in a tangle

of driftwood. Not until the small body washes up

on the sand does the father finally move

from the bridge, quickly now along the rocky shore

to the blue shirt, torn like a ragged slice of sky,

He sits back on his heels and sees.

Theatrics

coffee.  You’d flounce in at two a.m. with stories
of car trouble, needy friends, nothing   new.

I see you at three on your tricycle behind Nana’s veil,
the plumed hat, white gloves. You’d twirl

the backyard in your pinafore, kangaroo socks.

Once Mom wound gauzy white curtains around us

so we could play bride. I looked more like a mummy,

but yours was a bride smile, luminous, serene.

When you put the gun to your head three weeks before my wedding,

you must have known it would be your face

everyone would see when I lifted my veil.

In the night you speak to me, words fierce

as the winter eyes of wolves. I miss the storms,

you say, and I know the ones you mean:

August hurricanes thundering up the coast.

We’d hold hands as the skies detonated,

wish for beaches splintered with bedposts, pieces

of plumbing, random bits of fish. By September

smoke from the tomato factory colored the air red,

the cemetery on the corner disappearing

in a noose of crimson fog, drowning out

even the tomatoes, their slippery smells. 

When the fog lifted, one by one the tombstones rose

like a cityscape, gritty red sky floating over rooftops.

It’s my dream, but the bed reels with your squalls,

sudden, savage, the thunder of your applause.

A 2001 and 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee, Elizabeth Volpe lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including: Rattle, Atlanta Review, Borderlands, the Texas Poetry Review, California Quarterly, Phoebe, Diner, Crab Creek Review, Comstock Review, MacGuffin, and Adirondack Review. She received first prize in the Briarcliff Review 2004 Poetry Contest and the 2006 Metro Detroit Writers Contest. New work is forthcoming in The Connecticut Review.