TWO PoEMS
Leah Falk
after Malka Heifetz Tussman
when I watched a vulture family
appear and disappear
among the conifers by the marina—
they paraded up the steep grade,
the big one skipping briefly on the air
the way a child leaps to touch a doorframe
and I followed cypress branches
up to where the wild bay rollicked,
cut by the iron finger of a pier,
and on the dune a man reclined
eating a sandwich,
let the vultures circle, study him:
his skin sun-ruined, his hair
salt-curled. Our eyes met
and with the birds we formed
a fragile constellation
by which some seafarer, I imagined,
could approximate the shore—
a triangle whose precise calculation
could bring a body home
across unforgiving currents.
Then out of modesty or fear
or disbelief, we turned
again to the loose earth
while the vultures marched
behind a shrub, while waves
shattered in ardor on the rocks.
Humble Hour
Purple
California, 189_
Each summer, purple blooms
still opened like night-saturated
stars: morning glory, salvia,
lavender, applause
of jacarandas,
like sisters keeping one another’s
secrets. In well-appointed rooms,
suede voices murmured
like the creek, a soothing rush
of tongue over stones,
talking of mahogany and blond
and blue, horses and dry grasses,
cloudless sky.
Like the flowers, they were migrants
of a kind: a journey west
from Georgia in best clothes,
their father’s mission
like the ones to China,
South America, except this time
they stayed. Their hands
were never still: penciled
ledger, monogrammed
napkins, woodshed swept,
children combed and starched.
When they tore
the morning glories out,
the vines went on
like telephone wire, telling
the seed to open,
open. The white floss root
buried between the houses.
The men took their children boating,
stood wooden for photos,
hands on the boys’ shoulders,
hands that bore no marks
of the shapes they could make,
trumpets of salvia,
gowns of jacaranda. Purple
is a dressy color. Even a bruise
can look like an occasion –
sunset stained with wildfire.
A dress dyed to vanish
into twilight. A star
falls out of the sky
like a rhinestone hairpin.
Later, the sisters scattered
as seeds do, their marriages
no more than winds forecast.
Where they fell, they pricked
the soil like a thumb, let the blood bead.
Leah Falk is the author of two poetry collections, Other Customs and Practices and To Look After and Use. Her work has appeared recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Ilanot Review. She lives in Philadelphia, where by day she is Director of Education and Engagement at Penn Live Arts, the performing arts center at the University of Pennsylvania.