King, Queen, Knight
I taught my son how to move the pieces.
He likes only the patterns knights make,
not what they do to avoid sacrifice.
He regiments his pawns in a wall
inching forward, bishops close by,
not far from home, all of his men
huddled around a limping king who watches
what others dare to do. It is no use
telling him he can capture my queen
with just one short gallop. He won’t.
He’s unwilling to break the pattern
for the sake of the game. I want to say
I like the design he’s made, but tell him
attack, take the queen. I can’t spare the knight.
He climbs in my lap, sees his mother’s door.
He doesn’t ask why it’s shut at midday.
The chess men still stand. He says please don’t leave.
Leaving the Garden
The windows stayed open, the mosquitoes too small
to do any harm, but spiders we couldn’t see,
drawn there by summer’s long drought,
made tracks on our arms at night, leaving
enough poison to make us sleep through days,
days that should have shown us a paradise.
Who were we, naked in the late light,
making love next to the stone pool,
in the dry grass, too conscious of the neighbors’
view just past the wall, or the baby sleeping
above us on the next terrace? Our bare
feet aching from the apples that had fallen
early, useless like the sunflowers drooping
without color just under Mont Ventoux.
Montale had a sick wife too. Her blurred
vision, though, had sharpened his eyes
to time, her bandages and plasters
reminding him how little would remain.
I have no such sign, nothing to redeem,
nothing to destroy, no precious objects
to steady my memory–everything
gone like seeds whisked away by the mistral
blowing through the stones for days.
How impoverished the little market seems
with only three small oranges in the bin
and silent women eyeing an American
with a child whose wife rarely comes down
the hill. They will not speak to me.
On the first day of the new year, Petrarch
begins his retraction and turns
to the Virgin. Was Laura a woman
or the breeze? I have not been inspired.
In fact I cannot breathe. Was Hell certain
in the beginning, there between the light’s
serrated edges and the shadows
the clouds throw over the orchard’s leaves.
My son speaks to me in nursery rhymes,
still innocent without an alphabet.
My inadequate words will number his days
before they’re taken away from him.
Homeless
I toss your coat in the car, make excuses
to speak of nothing. You say the wind turns
the Belgian trees into supplicants.
In Bruges, strangers see intimacies
that I can’t hide easily, my palm
in the small of your back. […]
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All This, Just Now, This Once
I
My friend tells me what his blue-eyed soul
has done for him, while my brown-eyed one
curls herself on the floor, then lays her head
across the soft thighs of my friend’s wife.
He and I drink Guinness. They talk about life.
I’d be more useful if I stepped aside,
got more wood for the fire
or draped my wife’s socks on the screen,
and could say I know how warm she’d be
while I go outside and leave all this
to think for a moment something
she would never dream of.
II
I’m outside, the only one
who regards the snow that begins to fall
until I hear somebody’s neighbor call
inside to someone, “It’s snowing.”
So he’s taken it in. I return
and don’t want to tell everyone just now
what’s happening out there. Why
add anything to an evening?
They’ll see soon enough but not know
that I was out to be alone–
and wanted to walked off without a word
while the sky dampened every sound.
III
I know what it means to hear nothing,
but can’t tell, when the night settles down,
if the tide goes out near this house
where my son’s fallen asleep. […]
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Richard Wollman is the author of Evidence of Things Seen (Sheep Meadow Press), Changeable Gods (Elyse Wolf Prize, Slate Roof Press), and A Cemetery Affair (Finishing Line Press). His awards include the Gulf Coast Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. His poems appear in New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, and Notre Dame Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Literature & Creative Writing at Simmons University. His poems and sculptures may be found at richardwollman.com.