Editor’s note: This week’s Poetry Corner features the work of David Sahner. His poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Connecticut Review, White Heron, Blood and Fire Review and Buffalo Spree. He is a physician involved in clinical research, and he lives with his family in Santa Cruz.

Grandma’s Right Hand

Veins, green and ropy,
Flatten when your hand gyrates overhead
In an Italian aria of disdain
For the grubs that eat your tomatoes.

Calluses from mophandles
Whose chinks you’ve memorized,
A bulbous swelling at the second knuckle -
Sometimes gouty red.

Coarse skin investing bones,
Joints-a-poppin’ when you stir the lentils,
Sinews and tendons that I love
Even more than your soup.

Death and Transformation

The dead live within us.
And when we say their names
They flash a recondite smile
Invisible to all but those
On their side of the river.
If our forgetting threatens
Obscurity,
The quiet planet of oblivion,
They dart uneasy glances
Amongst themselves,
And then look at us doe-eyed.
We know that if we silence
Their cries,
We might as well be suffocating babies
In their sheets.
So we live with them
Within us.

Graveyard in Provence

A last gathering of light,
Our shadows,
The shadows of trees
Dipping toward infinity.

There is a sense of forgetting
At such times,
Yes, such times as these,
When the forest’s curtain
Draws apart to admit a sparrow,
Or some soft and timid animal of the wood.

The silence takes you by the hand
And pulls you to a field
Where souls loosen from their graves,
They rise from the ancient river,
Aching with their birth.

Quietly, they tell you forgetting
Is to be expected
At moments such as these,
Forgetting,
Not forgetting,
Yes, that too,
Which is so easy in these fields
Ignited by flecks of daylight falling
In showers upon the lilac.

The light that collects here
Is near an end
And near a source,

But seeing that makes
Not the smallest difference.

Moving

I am leaving this place.
A four-story walk-up on West End.
No one in the courtyard or the halls.
Just me and this prattling place.

Joists and lathing murmur
With the musings of ghosts.
Wonder if others will hear those sounds
At a cocktail party

When the conversation stops in a companionable way,
And the sound of a moan heaving in a
Woman’s chest slithers into the living room.
Will they be mortified by the low pitch of ecstasy?

And will they catch the viola’s trill (you played it so very finely)
In the third symphony Sibelius wrote,
Or the sweep of silk against a
Table, ivory and cold, that is no longer there?

Will they hear that?
Or is it better to drape these swatches of time
Over the railing of the balcony
Like clothes, rain-moistened,

And let them dry in a volcanic wind,
Finally moldering into bone-white dust
That blows along the way
I have yet to travel.

You

Acacia bleeding into the night.

A white face pulled
Through the mud of generations -

But you are here now,
Breathing into the crook
Of my arm,
You tabernacle beast,

Lolling in ponds
Of glistening steel,
So deliciously close to the edge
You are

A lash tied to the tail of a tiger.
My satyr,

My offspring
With fingers waggling
Blindly in my face,

You,
All I can see
Is you.

*“You” is being published with permission of “Bitter Oleander,” in which “You” previously appeared.
 

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