Lisa Russ Spaar
June 2005

Penance

Penance I

This sadness feels Medieval,
locked in ice and dusk
with just enough murk

to keep us from telling
two like coins apart
and to send us scuttling home

to the lives we’ve earned,
with no toothed wheel
in God’s clock turret

to mark off and measure
our conflux of gain and loss,
but just enough light left

to blow our souls apart
with loneliness, that hair’s-breadth,
secondhand undertaking of the heart.


Penance II

Inside my shoes, the sharp stone
of pleasure shows me the way
my shadow crosses, then disappears

into divinity—mark of me
absorbed by sun that inches up
the measured hours of my spine,

tenderly, loving each hobbled bone,
each link and chain,
then soaring beyond the reach of words.


Penance III

An early March wind scours
this late afternoon with its annual exposé,

twisting and cuffing a red paper lantern
hung outside the Vietnamese noodle shop.

A runnel from the broken gutter above
taps taps against its tissued drum

with a maddeningly slow-motion, lyric clarity,
wresting into itself all of the weak, returning light,

spotting the patch of shoveled snow beneath
with drops of blood. I kick through

the sooty slush, trailing the takeout window
and its sputtering scarf of heat and garlic

behind me. O world that forces joy
upon us, who seemed made for sorrow.


Penance IV

What’s the penalty
for such a day, spent high

on a crop of stone
overlooking the world’s theater?

Even the sky is bright
with the rub of Paradise,

a spectacle below us:
all ransacked clouds and birds

on invisible trellises,
blue shadows roping the valley,

pewter sutures
of river and Interstate,

and sun abstracting the palisades
with pastel bombs of pear and dogwood,

the maple’s scarlet wattage,
forsythia’s lemon ice,

and my hand at your mouth,
its wet promise –

this makes me feel primitive –
banishing dread and winter’s drama.

Perhaps the ransom
is God’s to pay, for once,

so we, who have so many
other debts,

can have these hours
for free, night and return

delayed by upheld arms,
hostage and blooming.


Penance V

Fare well, stark
arterial calligraphy
leanly strapping the dead lawn;

goodbye, monastic,
unimpeded light.
For this gangly impost

of forsythia will arch
beside the drive,
and pollen reign in baroque haze

among treetops
flocked with gold
and blowsy scepters.

Do we invent what we need?
Then these clustering birds,
sherry-eyed and exultant scions,

sing for you, from whom
the world has reclaimed a gift.
Like me, they want to fill your empty arms.

From Blue Venus, Persea Books, 2004.