A Woman of a Certain Age

I’m older than most people here
at this vacation paradise,
where the smell of ginger
rises with every slight breeze.
I’m traveling with my daughter,
who is 16 and beautiful,
easy in her skin.
I could be invisible.
I am invisible to the hoards of young men
with slender hips, whose eyes slide past me,
then snap into focus on my daughter.
A woman of a certain age, such as myself,
could be brought to her creaking knees.
The staff call me mamá.
I am a function, an anglo dueña.
So today I fight back,
hit a double in a softball game,
catch a pop fly that makes the third out,
kyack a few miles,
snorkel and swim with the clown fish.
Did I mention yoga at sunrise,
naked on my balcony,
then writing a poem that pleases me?
But tonight, after a leisurely dinner,
my daughter heads for the disco.
On the way back to my room, I pass a couple.
They are just about my age.
She has her arm around his waist.
He rests his hand on her hip,
slides it back and forth over her silk dress.
I am aware of Noah’s rule,
all things two by two.
This is the natural order of things.
I am not opposed.
I lie on my bed, under the noisy fan,
sip a second glass of wine,
and read Stones from the River.
Every now and then, I smell the ginger
and I lose my place.

Dear Theo

I must write to you, I need to tell you –
what exactly? I yearn for you to know
what I see inside my head, my heart,
that which I try to paint on the canvas.
Sometimes I feel on fire, truly.
As though my body is being consumed
from the inside, in a fever
that can only be assuaged
by my realizing on canvas what I see.
Today, I did two more renderings of the miners,
eating their potatoes . It is essential
to catch the light, just one patch here,
another there. The second time I moved
the position of a man’s hand, but
it still wasn’t right. I have no choice
but to do it again - this will be
the twentieth time! I cannot sleep
until I try another. I have this sense
that I am the guardian of these images,
God knows why, and I hope He does,
for I do not. I only know that I am
compelled, like Jacob wrestling
with the Angel. Sometimes, when I see
my neighbor coming home from the fields
at sundown, his children waiting for him,
a wife to keep him warm at night,
I am lonelier than I can bear and want
to throw everything away that I have done,
burn it. Really, no one understands
what I am doing. Who would care, except you,
dear Theo, and even you, I know, care more
for me than for my paintings.
And I am glad for that - you are my only thread
of love - and I do not destroy my work -
I keep on and on, never sure if my despair
at ever rendering what I envision will be the end
of me - or if this internal fire, this agitation,
this ceaseless pressure, is my necessary companion
on this headlong process.
I fear the Angel is winning

Still, Life

Once upon a time I married a photographer
and, one day, I trailed behind him into Central Park
after a long snowstorm had ended.
We trekked through dense drifts, our breath frosted gray white,
the cold tightening our throats.
Along the way, some pine bough, thick laden, would catch his eye,
the way its black shadow lay across the snow, or a branch bare of snow
that rose stark toward the shocking blue of the noon sky.
Then he would stop to focus his lens, to record a detail of bark,
or angel tracings children had embodied in the snow.
And I took pictures in my mind, of him taking pictures,
how he saw what he saw, how I saw

him, all absorbed in nothing
but this time, snatching memory from these passing shots,
to be developed, made substantial, as though one could hold on
in this way to the translucent changes of this world,
as now, although he is gone, I see him again
in this photograph, that I know by heart.