MAKE A GLAD NOISE; IT IS SPRING
I want my poems to make her sing. I want my
poems to make her toll the bells of her baby’s
toes, glad they are still there. I want my poems
to make her dream, of the mysteries of life
because there are so many: the birds that sing
in this theatre in the round, one sparrow in
each window. Make a glad noise; it is
spring. Up from the snow the crocus has
sprung, fresh from its rubbery root; it
bends back its head and opens its mouth
to hallelujah sing. High above, in pyramids
of love, the sparrows also are singing;
in the black tree branches, down the
clean spring trenches, the blackbirds
and crow toes are singing. For bright
new beginnings, from the plenums of their
pews, the bluebirds and jackdaws are
singing. Make a glad noise; it is spring.
The squirrel that fled the diving hawk has
landed safe on the bending branch. His
tail is high and arched; making a good,
stiff brush for spring cleaning. Make a glad
noise; it is spring. From the tops of the hills
to the valleys below, the world like a chorus
is singing. The people are pouring from their
winter houses and heading for the high church
steeple. The summoner has summoned, and
the bells have rung and the pilgrims in their
pews are holding each other’s hands.
COUPLES, GREEN WITH ENVY
My eighty-year-old neighbors drive by
in their green Subaru, the woman at
the wheel. She pulls on the blinker and
slows to a stop at my street, readying
to turn in. I see her nose in profile,
and beside her, the back of her husband’s
head, a few grey hairs sticking out, his
glasses clinging to an ancient scarab
of ear and then, abandoned in my own
life by two disappointing men, I am
green with envy. They will die apart,
of course, and be buried in separate graves,
but in this life, they have learned to live
as one: on some days warm and close;
on others separated by occasional clouds,
but ultimately loyal and unbetraying,
like twins in profile staring forward;
driving into, as they ward off, the dark.
CUT BACK
Last year the gardener cut the bushes
back too much that used to swing by
my bedroom window. He left them bare,
their branches shorn. All winter long,
those branches bothered me, clattering
unprotected, maddened by nasty
weather. But come spring, how
fiercely they flourished, reconstituting
themselves from gray sticks into
swinging bud rods, with pointed leaves
and lilac-colored flowers and rubbery
collars especially appealing to the butterflies
and to the needle-thin, nectar-sucking
bills of the hummingbirds that beat their
invisible wings at my window now.
ON A FARM
Evidence of death is all around me:
roots and rot; animals lying sideways
in their graves; dead leaves clinging to
grass; a mirror decaying (no longer
capable to show the implacable face
of beauty); even the majestic maple,
centerpiece of all that’s beautiful on
this backyard farm, with trunk too
large to wrap my arms around, sheds
bark. Past that tree, where my planet
ends and neighbor’s yard begins, I find
more things to remind me: a tangled
stretch of barbed wire fence where once
an aimless cow rubbed its aching flank
along; a shoehorn shaped like a tongue;
a feather stranded in a crack of rock,
a broken egg beneath a branch (seacoast
blue, pale enough to see the light sky
through); a predatory snake, hiding in
the grass; the eye of a robin, fading fast;
rusty nails that used to hold a barn against
the storm; a bag of garbage buried
in the sand; a rose petal dried to a toy
soldier’s painted shirt; other toys, played
with once by children long since grown
(now with addresses underground); a shoe
heel pulverized by dirt; everything but sun,
wind, rain, and stars ground down by winter
weather. There is nothing novel here,
nothing new; nothing that won’t be
endlessly repeated: the shoe that sinks in
this garden plot has me in it. I’ll be lying
with my predecessors soon; the family
I saw in the Christmas photo, arranged
in a row at the back of the house, each
with turned out bookends for ears and a
separate eggshell for a still-living head;
my future’s here, devolving on this farm,
tunneling dirt with my insect fellows
or in the pretty flowers endlessly growing.
Nor do I object. Almost everything
I have ever loved or painfully lost, even
almost the whole beauty of earth, can
be found here on this farm. I have rolled
them back, dumb and unseeing, the
gems that were my predecessor’s eyes.
When you buy my farm and come, on
this same spot, you may roll back lapis
lazuli stones, and know that they were mine.
Lisa Low’s poetry, reviews, interviews, and academic essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, Crack the Spine, Cross Currents, Delmarva Review, Evening Street Press, The Boston Herald, Phoebe, The Portland Press Herald, Potomac Review, and Aphros Literary Magazine, among others. She is one of the editors of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. She received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and Pace University in New York City. In addition to her work as an educator, Low was briefly a film and theatre critic for Christian Science Monitor.
