Monday, May 26, 2014

B.Z. Niditch- Two Poems

TS ELIOT'S WALK

At my poetry reading
a blue Bird is watching

under a lambent sun
I'm eating strawberries
on Cape Ann
where you gaze
by sails waking the light
at the last high tide
before you chose to be
exiled as an expatriate
to England,
your "Mother Country"
like Henry James,
but you too were formal
only to art
with words to make alive
and to play immaculately
with a vagary and sensibility
unlike your country's literati
as you sit on a bench
by Plum Island winds
long enough to hear
the sea going voices
by the whiplash 
of the waves
in your wing beat of a soul
in your transfigure strings
to change an epoch
with episodic breath
away from all your
crumbled demons
of a knotted
immediate green
in a harbinger of survival.




ELIZABETH BISHOPS DEMONS

That May locked you out
in a pinned depression
as you left Cambridge
and us for a season
for fine rainy Brazil
yet there was peace in
your silence, half heard
when you were asked
in a full auditorium
of poetry admirers
to recite from a collection
of dark blinding verse
as I peered at the doors
at your sheltered smile
as mount the podium
and austere gray rugs
as a high wired editor
of the Crimson asks you
after your reading
during the Q and A session
if you were really
in love with Robert Lowell
and your brief answer
so appropriate
with a brush of time
in your hands
sealing your world
at unknowable isolation
as you will soon allow 
a South American
wisdom to capture you
away from personal demons
of your own loneliness
as you meet someone
who became a life partner
beyond bypassed waves
in a blue aired saltiness
signed between lines
of my book
suspecting a friendship
by a fireplace aflame
at Memorial Hall
not forgetting how
memory embraces
into the guiding sunlight
of Harvard Square
in your stoplight eyes.

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