Claire Keyes
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CLAIRE KEYES is the author of The Question of Rapture, a collection of poems. Professor Emerita at Salem State College, where she taught English for thirty years, she has also written The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, newly published in paperback in 2009 by the University of Georgia Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, The Valparaiso Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is a resident of Marblehead, Massachusetts.
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POEM ENDING IN A LINE BY ROBERT FROST
Today I’m the woman with the microphone
and sheets of poems, summoned to entertain
the ancient ones, slumped in wheelchairs,
eyes rimmed in red. They stare up at me
like children shoved into the cloakroom at school.
Eyes that say I grew old. Is that a crime?
Just shoot me, my mother told us
when talk turned to old age, not opting
for the lung cancer that sucked out her life.
One woman flaps her arms. I never agreed
to this, she moans, flicking her tongue.
I persist with Bishop’s the art of losing
isn’t hard to master. She parries
in what sounds like Greek, insists on being heard.
It’s no joke when the end is closer than the beginning
and your skin no longer fits. An attendant
wheels her out. We continue with our poems,
e e cummings and his little lame balloon man,
Edna St. Vincent Millay with her jaunty sonnets,
the climax a reading of Casey at the Bat.
If I can teach the young to turn squiggles
into sentences that reach and touch. And I have.
Then I can put down my sheaf of poems,
take a basin of warm water, a bar of lavender soap,
and work my way along the row of wheelchairs,
chanting softly as I rub my washcloth
between their toes, around their swollen ankles:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
© 2008-2009 Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts, Inc.
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