Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Carol Moldaw
The motel, with its “pay per view,”
is more scenic than the scenic drive,
and more exotic, with you
putting your forehead to mine
to check for fever, prescribing cola,
and charting our road, first with one finger,
then your whole hand….
The next day it’s tempting to touch
the cavern walls, but we don’t,
knowing the oils we secrete
indelibly mar and stain.
Those draperies and columns, thrones
and soda straws, I’d like to see
the Winged Victory among them,
not to compare and choose,
but to be doubly bowled over.
The Winged Victory, and what’s left
of the Parthenon! But then,
when they turned out the lights
down there, eight hundred feet down,
and it was absolutely unlit,
pitch black, and for a moment
they had us hushed (until someone,
a crying child, broke the silence
and everyone began making noise),
wasn’t that hair of a second in total
quiet and darkness, though fleeting,
one of the best moments yet?
That, and the amphitheater at dusk,
watching the cave’s long exhalation
of bats, and then the first stars.
The world has so many ways to woo us,
so many unexpected vistas,
and miraculously so much of it (your face
at rest, eyeglasses off) near at hand.
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A man cups his fingers as if to bring them
to his lips to blow me a goodbye kiss,
or, as if he were Italian, to underscore
his words. He is not Italian; he is not
speaking; and he does not bring his fingers
to his lips. Gravely, they descend upon a peony
held up by the rim of its fishbowl vase.
Because I would be his, he tells me a secret
it is mine to know, all the while spreading
the silky petals with his slowly opening hand
so that the peony is made to bloom to its fullest,
until it is an open globe, overbrimming the vase.
Only now do I think of those paper flowers
that blossomed when we floated them in water,
as girls. The words of the secret blurred
as soon as I woke, but his light hand
gravely forcing the peony, that remains.
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About the Poet
Carol Moldaw lives in Pojoaque. Both of these poems are from her latest book, Chalkmarks on Stone.
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