Two Poems
Sharon Denmark
Permission
As candles burn on the mirrored dresser,
sooting the vanilla ceiling, whisper
"death” into the curl of your lover’s ear,
that dirty word, dug up from underneath
the twisted ivy. This world isn’t ours,
we can’t even look at the sun. We’re bundled
vulnerabilities, all our softness
on the outside. Just past mile marker 44
a once white cross is nailed to a pine’s rough
trunk, hanging so long the name’s washed away.
I will save you the trouble and tell you
now, I am dying. You can pull the plug.
Splinters of wood and chips of paint drift down
into a bed of curled leaves.
Today I knocked cellar spiders
out of conch shells. They tumbled, stunned,
into the cold light, so thin
they were almost invisible.
Haunting
I thought my mother was haunting the spare
bedroom because the light kept flickering
and it was, after all, the room she slept in
at her sickest, in an old twin bed shoved
against the wall, the frame still screwed to the headboard
I used as a child. But it was summer,
and the room was never cold, I never saw
my breath condense in a suspenseful cloud
in front of my wide-eyed gaze.
Maybe she haunts the garden, planting daffodil bulbs
and shaking ants off the fat pink heads of peony blooms.
But I know, if her ghost is here
she’s sitting in front of the TV
crocheting a sage green scarf for me,
while she smokes her way
through a pack of Merit 100s,
and the scarf won’t be done until it’s long enough
to wind round my neck and down my legs,
past my knees, pooling at my feet.
Sharon Denmark is a painter and writer living in the southern part of Virginia. Her poems have recently appeared in FERAL and Many Nice Donkeys. Her visual work can be seen at www.460arts.com and is forthcoming in 3Elements Review.