The Red Wheelbarrow Poets

Eulogy for Eleanor

John Barrale

I was twelve; she was eight.

My mother forced me to go— her funeral mass

was a sad storybook on a Sunday morning.

The night before her coffin floated

in a forest of flowers and ribbons.

Under its closed lid, I imagined her head

resting on a satin pillow—

jewel-like, exact

and delicate.

Black Plastic Bags

Wayne L. Miller

When my brother
and I emptied
our parents’ house,
we threw out most
of what we found.

My son will keep
2%. But as I work
under bare-bulb
light, I don’t know
which 2%.

Gracie’s Mother

Zorida Mohammed

Gracie’s mother was a “satwantee,”
a woman who was meant to bear seven children.
Her oldest child stuttered so hard
he stopped talking.

Her second child, her first daughter,
was the rag she wiped the floor with,
the daughter who came home
after her husband died
in a mysterious boat accident,
and cared for her mother
until her miserable end.

It is always their first child
that the parents cut their child-rearing teeth on.

Gracie’s mother saved me from a rabid father—
abetted by a bed-ridden mother–
wielding a solloloy belt,
and stringing mind-numbing words
that should not have found themselves next to each other,
words that fragmented sound,
threatening to alter us kids, like pigs!
for misbehaving.

The only sounds that escaped over the hibicus hedge
were water falling on dishes being washed
by long-haired maidens,
Indian songs on their radio,
and the humming of the ruby throats in the red flowers,
the hedge that encircled their yard
and edged the bandan in back,
where it wouldn’t take hold, except
in runty patches,
no matter how many re-plantings.

The old envy I harbored for this family
of such good and obedient children
choked tears out of the memories
standing in front of me.

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The Parallels

Donald Zirilli

I’m crying in your shoebox.
You’re laughing in my kitchen drawer,
beneath the Chinese menus.

Your window and my window
open their curtains on a single scene,
a comet pulsing against a red moon,
its signal falling on our rooftops.
You know what the antennae receive.
I know how much the water towers hold.

When we’re shopping for dinner,
we tend to buy the same cheap wine,
a red called Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.
We’ve been to Montepulciano,
shivering outside of an old stone cathedral,
but the wine hasn’t.

The wine is only telling us
the name of its grapes,
like a flushed penitent, dizzy and proud
in the dark confessional,

and we’re the priests
sitting quietly, taking it all in.
There’s only a whisper between us,
but, facing the same direction,
we see the ghosts of each other
seeing ghosts of ourselves.

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Byron and Shelley A-Rowing

Janet Kolstein

The words and that voice held Shelley hostage
as the sun roamed across the liquid city
to drown blazing in a western canal.

Bridges and basilicas brokered conversation;
the younger poet’s agenda wrangled in the reeds
and into open seas where discourse caught a headwind
and sailed far beyond the shores of the lagoon.
Their slender boat, poled by song,
bobbed and slid over the dead fish stink
of last century’s Casanova
and the doge’s bygone rule.

And elsewhere, in the huddle of conversazione,
Venetian ladies and puttanas alike
might fan an afternoon’s seduction
under the aegis of the great winged griffon.

While wives and lovers simmered in the wings,
Oxford and Cambridge, spirit and matter —
“Julian and Maddalo” —
two wild enchanted minds
spun a literary web of intrigue
that would last far beyond their lifetimes.

Each thought the other mad.

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