New Poems


Playing the Piano

At the end of the hunting season outside Barcelona
the men make a game of hanging the hound
who has captured the fewest pheasants and hares
they bring her forth without any leash
from her cage just one big fist gripping
the nylon collar leading her out by her elegant neck
to the fire by the traditional tree
where they are drinking and roasting fresh meat
and have strung a thick rope from a low and muscular limb
the ones who have done this before and know how to
make the rope easy to work fashion a small noose
that the hound's narrow head will fit through nicely
they tempt her then with a torn-off piece of raw pheasant
so that she wags her slender and white-tipped tail
and obliges and as she is eating they adjust the knot
at first she looks only confused then panicked
and whimpers a little this does not go on very long
the men are laughing more loudly and starting to
throw empty bottles and picked-bare bones
of pheasant against her flanks then they chant
it is time to do what they came for
the one who is lucky this year
gets to stagger up to the base of the tree
hoist the rope and the hound begins
her horrible ascent as her paws leave the earth
she kicks as if she were chasing
the hare she almost caught
this kicking this appeal this apology
they call it playing the piano the legs so deft
barely touching the grass tips then in the air completely
still trying to kick but weaker and finally
just the sad reflexive treading
the men laugh so hard in the new shade of her
that some of the greenest leaves flutter free of the limb
from which she will hang until dawn
when they tire of song and drink
and when they are gone the last green leaf
drifts down as if to feed
the dying fire

                 first appeared in Poet Lore


To a Timber Wolf

For this I will need a blank page
a sky in absolute focus over the same few miles
of Alaska an airplane's simple shadow
and when I am ready
a grave full of snow that will never fall here
a thin mother wolf embracing
with purposeful forelegs a fresh carcass
from which she is gnawing the lean
chest muscle free for her pups
as the gunner's binoculars twist her gold eyes
close as a lover's though if he were anywhere near her
she would have no choice
but to strike with all eight hundred pounds per square inch
of the glorious teeth God gave her for tearing
so it is easier doing away with her from the air
not even killing really just training
the gun's eye making it see clear inside her
neutral heart and back out
to the pellet of blood on the dazzling sunlight
now making the gun want one of the beats
now making the other poor beat
be the bullet


                 first appeared in Field


Girlfriends Braiding Each Other's Hair
                 for Chip

But now they are safe: one seated
before the slender and dutiful other,
the ivory handled mirror that has stayed
in her family glass-up on the rug; the sunlight
finding its own temporal girlishness,
while one brushes her best friend's

sacrum-length hair, lifts a swath at a time of it
into her palm and untangles it first
without pulling; then strokes it
from root to end with the boar bristles,
weaving it in, and does the same
with the next and the third

although they were fighting
and crying an hour ago over a boy,
over who had turned in the best
essay on freedom. They have reached this
feminine peace and their faces
are faces of women

they will be in good time, the women
who always did this in the end:
not only two but a circle of women
taking their seats, not facing each other.

                 first appeared in Salamander


Shelter

It was only a joke: her two big sisters
mailing the note to her they had managed to type
on their father's Remington Rand, saying
the Russians are going to bomb
your bedroom today, signed "The Russians"
and telling her she would be safe
if she took off her clothes and went to the attic
alone with no food or juice
just Davey, her stuffed cocker spaniel,
and hid all day in the crease of the folded cot;
so she and the toy dog stayed in that hot, woody dark,
the blue ticked mattress and springs holding them close
like a cloth-and-wire angel, the feathery moths
sipping the sweat on her neck and toes.
When they sounded the all-clear triangle
they had snuck home from the first-grade
orchestra, and stamped up the slivery stairs
loud as police, she cried, but only a little, glad
that the Russians had had a change
of heart, and dropped the bomb
next door, killing just the McLaughlins'
poor noisy parakeet, that they
were her sisters, only her sisters,
who loved her, and that she could smell
the hot shepherd's pie from the kitchen
as they gave her back her white undies
and tee-shirt and corduroy overalls,
as they helped her braid her hair.


                 first appeared in Black Warrior Review


Ride

I did not ask, but knelt, unlocked the wheels
of his chair so it would coast, a tour boat
over the linoleum, past
the nurses' backs and out beyond
the sign-in book and dish of mints,
the lurching doors, out farther, down
the frost-heaved walk, the pocked,
maternal sycamores. He wanted nothing

of the world he'd not seen
for two years, nothing but the stout will
not to leave it, not to pass yet
through the crooked gate in need
of paint, the yellow lab behind it barking,
barking at her slimy tennis ball lodged tight
beneath a spindly lilac bush; the grass brown
from the overtired sun, one purple crocus up.


                 first appeared in Poet Lore

 © Frannie Lindsay.