MARY MERIAM [18.367]

Mary Meriam 

Poeta EE.UU.  Nacida y criada en Nueva Jersey, Mary Meriam obtuvo un BA de la Universidad de Bennington y MFA de la Universidad de Columbia. Es la autora de cinco libros de poemas, entre ellos Conjuring My Leafy Muse (Headmistress Press, 2013) and Girlie Calendar (Headmistress Press, 2014) y los Chapbooks The Countess of Flatbroke (Modern Metrics/Exot Books, 2006), The Poet’s Zodiac (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), and Word Hot (Headmistress Press, 2013).

Editó la antología, Irresistible Sonnets (Headmistress Press, 2014), and Lady of the Moon (with Amy Lowell and Lillian Faderman) (Headmistress Press, 2015). 

Sus poemas han aparecido en 12 antologías, incluyendo más recientemente, Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House, 2015). Her poetry, prose, and reviews have appeared in Adrienne, American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Angle, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Bridges, Cimarron Review, Eyewear, Journal of Lesbian Studies, KIN, Light, Literary Imagination, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Ms. Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, OCHO, Poetry Northeast, Rattle, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Critical Flame, The Evansville Review, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and The New York Times. New poems are forthcoming in Prelude and The Women's Review of Books. A new chapbook of poems, The Lesbian, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press.

ROMANCE DE LA EDAD MEDIA

Ahora que tengo cincuenta años, déjame ducharme

por la noche, sin luz, con los ojos cerrados. Y déjame nadar

furtivamente. Mi piel está tatuada con horas

y días y décadas, de cabeza a los pies, de tan fina

es sólo una fotografía descolorida. Es extraño

cómo la gente mira hacia otro lado a quien antes admiraba.

No sabía que me sometería a este cambio

para ser la cubierta invisible de un libro

cuyo argumento, aunque banal, le proporciona más volumen.

Por los placeres de la mente y el corazón

se llega a contrarrestar más rápido la pérdida

de conocimiento. Uno siente que reviven antiguas urgencias,

aunque todavía me arranco los pelos de la barbilla con una pinza,

en el caso de que pudiera llamar la atención de otro anciano.

Versión de Carlos Alcorta

The Romance of Middle Age

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers

at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim

in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours

and days and decades, head to foot, and slim

is just a faded photograph. It’s strange

how people look away who once would look.

I didn’t know I’d undergo this change

and be the unseen cover of a book

whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.

One reaches for the pleasures of the mind

and heart to counteract the loss of quicker

knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,

although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,

in case I might attract another geezer.

Plaintive Note Motel

Mother, are you lonely? I hear you sigh, then

moan in steady beats while you sleep beside me,

wounded moans, some tragedy never told me

               strangling your song-pipe.

Breath by breath, the moaning of Mother reddens,

death by drugs, flushed fugue, how she suffers sigh-sick

groans, while I, as always her daughter-stranger,

               ride my red wagons,

twist and trickle down on my twin slim bed in

Plaintive Note Motel, where we stay to witness

Kenny’s wedding. Marriage, was that the trouble?

               Moaning, my mother’s

stone unturned; a shot in the dark, my guesses.

Burned is Mother’s everyday state, her fury

blackness brushes by on my rising nowhere,

               faster and faster.

Beginning with a Line by Robert Frost 

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.

They spoke to me one windy day from the copse nearby my house.

Low in the night they rustled to thief and owl and addict and mouse.

Let me be deaf to the crash of trouble and the mighty underworld.

The pile of rotten branches and gold leaves lies there dead and swirled.

It would take every court in the countryside to count the fallen leaves.

The judges must number themselves among the dirt-thirsty thieves.

I live in a room of cold-toed winter glowing with no relief.

Wandering silent, muttered about, I move from grief to grief.

Wolf 

Mother, a wolf is wolfing me

Down. I thought I had a mother

But now I'm being wolfed. See?

Mother, a wolf is wolfing me

Down, your baby one sweet pea

Bit by hot teeth. I want another

Mother. A wolf is wolfing me

Down. I thought I had a mother.

Thought in a Heat Wave

The words, the books, the strain,

the loneliness, the pain,

the beast of woe, the lion roar,

it doesn't matter anymore

because I have a thought,

tamed, soothed, caught:

the poetry I said to you,

the lines that led to you,

the arteries around my heart,

the words I read to you,

the breath and rhymes, the breathing in,

the us not dead to you,

the dancing of you in my dreams;

I could be wed to you;

my loveline veering off my palm

could go, instead, to you;

your jewel burning in my mind,

your brilliant cry, so kind,

your evening sky of cobalt blue,

yes, I think of you

and I together in one place,

with time and room to sigh,

and moved by magic to embrace

the body, you and I.

Three Crowns of Misfortune

I. Stripper

Down the tawny, blood-red, and orange cast-offs

fall, like fairies tossing their crinkled clothing,

party-worn and faded in golden slants of

           earth-sinking sunlight;

all the Loves undone with her frock come falling,

dress undresssed, unbuttoned, unzipped, Misfortune,

barefoot, rootless, stripped of her silver tree bark,

           shivers for strangers.

Not for strangers! Pitiless Love with velvet

gloves demands this stripping of leaf and costume,

downward dancing, falling forever, falling,

               falling forever.

 

II. Sweatshop

Wait for nothing, wait for the Loves, what matter

night that gallops, tramples her roses, horses,

wildmares, slung here fruitless and starved, Misfortune

           slips on the cliff’s edge,

falls and falls with no one to catch her, over

rock face, street lamp, oceans apart from comfort,

mother, sister, lover; she sighs now, listen:

           love is unlikely.

Melancholic silkiness, cobalt, Loves hum

blue, the sidewalk saddens in Spanish Harlem

drums at dusk, at midnight, then morning traffic

           trumpets her shortfall.

 

III. Hack

Through the elms and ginkgos, alert to all her

listing, shrinking, deviance, sunk tomorrow,

no tomorrow ever, for sorrow’s lonely

           arrows transfix her.

This is dark desertion, and silent, bitter

cold. She sits alone in the automobile,

waiting. Danger shoots her. The Loves go quickly

           somewhere without her.

Now the wheel is seized by some force outside her.

Death will drop her over the bridge. Misfortune,

desperate, poisoned, jinxed, a forgotten fire,

           fights like a soldier.

Somewhere Along the Spectrum

(for Tiffany Krupa)

I take a class in feminine approach.

I hold my breath about my boyish clothes.

There is a subject I’m afraid to broach,

and for this fear I’m granted one red rose.

She smells so good, I wonder what she knows.

We leave the class together, go downtown

and dance. The beat goes fast and then it slows

until the slowness seeps inside and down.

Down to the dancing floor I fall and drown.

The dancers strip me clean of every shred

of gown and every penny in my crown.

I leave the Duchess, bleeding from the head,

naked and blind to nakedness, a mist

below the radar of the feminist.

.