Two Poems
Copyright 2004 Kate Delany


Self Portrait with my Family

We are the Younger Brueghel's peasants:
stiffly smiling
working our way
diligently through the dance
caged in tawny light

I can't pick my own face out
of this peopled landscape--
I am everyone
at the village wedding
the town burial of some
mute inglorious milton
who like us, stock figures,
might have wished
for some impending
deux ex machina
or interjection
from the chorus

Of course, the old man
dreamed it his way--
all the folks,
exuberant slabs
of brick red, olive black,
madonna blue, posed
in permanent siesta under a tree.

Thankfully, the young revise
because there's something
in the son's copies
something in the color speaking
sadness, unspoken by the subject
unknown to the world
painted by bourgeois brushstroke
sold to a patron, some
decorative private suffering
for his study's walls

Little Pete, I like you
for not reproducing that painting
that "Landscape with Icarus"
where we appear ignorant
of the winged boy's fall

Do you know why we
labored on, even as we listened
to the shrill splash
of the little body
breaking the waves--
what lies behind
and ahead of us
on that steep rocky hillside:
all the lost lives,
all the children,
dead without wings?


Always Open

out of the bar, three a.m., not numb yet
we stammer, bleary eyed, unspent

we plough the car down the companionless highway
neon signs and stop lights, our stars
illuminating places still open
empty parking lots, lone store clerks
keeping their quiet, static, expectant vigils

we ramble on behind the wheel, roll down windows
blare loud music to shock the senses
at this late hour we would like
to stop somewhere but we cannot--
devastated by everything always open
when we know we must sleep


-- -- --
Kate Delany - is a freelance writer who teaches in the English Department at Rutger's University. Her previous poetry has appeared in The Jabberwock Review, 13th Moon, The Advocate, Lilith, Along the Path, Nomad's Choir and The Writer's Exchange.


Top | Home

Home

Fiction | Essays | Art







UNDER AND OUT THE RED STAR
by Max Roland Ekstrom

The Suicide of Vincent van Gogh
by Jacob Scanlan

Two Poems
by Kate Delany

Inwardly, Outwardly
by Ralph Malachowski

Three Poems
by Joanne Lowery

Voice
by Jane Dalton

Possessed
by Karin Wittig

January on Bellevue Avenue
by Amy Munno

A Villanelle for Elvis
by Beth Anne Bates

Ascendant Blackness
(English Version)
by Lara Krasnobroda

Negrura Ascendente
(Spanish Version)
by Lara Krasnobroda

Entropy
by Jesse Carr

There is but a slow and subtle difference
by James Suit