Deborah Bogen

Cantilevered Bedtime Story

Wallpaper farm, the girl
with the duck, the friendly
farmer's father-work,
the moony mother's queer
stare and the bee-hivey
haystacks, the pitchforks,
the curly cows by the pond.

Elsewhere a window frames
green light. Elsewhere,
the dark-hall-doorway,
the long walk to the kitchen's
grown-up talking. The Singer
in the corner, electric
and shiny and under the bed,
and under the bed...

O happy wallpaper girl,
the cow wants to give you
her milk. The father's pitchfork
is strong and serene, but what
can be done for the woman
in the fluttering apron
who gaze is seaward, and
elsewhere, and gone?

Iowa Review April 2008
copyright, Deborah Bogen

JANUARY POEM FOR MY FATHER

Think of a snowfall before the first child wakes, before sled runners slice the hill and the boots of hunters do their work. We've climbed to the top of another year -- even the Quick-Stop sparkles in this light.

This year I'll clean the closet, lose ten pounds, write a letter. Maybe I'll call my father's friend, the one who saved his life in Okinawa on a road that in the photo snakes off into dark. In the picture, Dad and his pals lean on their tank relaxed as boys on a playground, mouths smoke-stained, hands beer-bottled, rifles stacked and set aside like hay. The beer's good and they grin into the camera thinking they can see what's coming.

Thinking they can see what's coming next.



this is from "Living Next to the Children's Cemetery."


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six at the beginning



                                             means:
                                             when ribbon grass is pulled up
                                             the sod comes with it.
                                                               I Ching


You know this one, He’s old.
And rich. He can do what he
wants. It would even be boring
but there’s threat to the soil.
She has the naked glance of
fourteen, hair tucked beneath

her cap and he wants to take
that, the lustrous unveiling.
It’s hard to be without the cash
to crush a fat old man, hard to
face it, as you julienne the carrots
in his wife’s kitchen. She stands

with a knife in her hands as he
comes downstairs. The curls fall
like ribbons, filling the hollow
at her neck. And though we
want to say at the end that she
recovers wholly, it isn’t true.


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