Sunflowers, New Mexico

                                            for Barbara
 
The red-streaked cliffs are beautiful
as blood, and again it’s blood you think of,
how it spills beyond us, has its own borders,
when the low basin over the brow of a hill
is all a flood, an inland sea of sunflowers.
Your aunt’s favourite flower – and she
by no lights a nice woman, indeed,
all told, nasty, but how she would love this.
It’s painful how you can’t separate things,
disentangle love, comb it into an own domain.
Like the colour in rock or smell of a red
willow basket, it’s there, it remains.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in South ⌗70, Oct 2024

 
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Qui fu innocente l’umana radice
                                                            Purgatorio XXVIII, 142

1
 
A first streak and glimmer part land and sky.
Light comes seeping like something new on earth,
defining shape and matter, giving birth
to the heron on a rock, scarlet lichen.
 
Things grow solid, put on being, are there –
the mesh of sand, small craft moored by the bridge,
ripples swelling in, out, fingering a width
of water which might be air it is so clear.
 
And here comes a man, too, pedalling into sight.
He has cod in his bag, fresh off the quay –
taking off his boots, coat. Just given him, free!
(First cod, boots, dewy coat.) Face child bright.
 
2
 
They call this slope of fell moen –
 
it sounds like ‘moon’
    feels like a room of its own
 
                off the earth
                                             floating
I climb
               trying to avoid the glisten
 
ice on a road which has
become track
rock
 
Mother waxes and wanes
 
How can you be dead?
 
I turn to ask
 
                        a trick of light
                                                      a slick on air
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in Scintilla ⌗27, 2024

 
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Dialogue with Louise Glück (1)

From what was this time deducted?
                                                               L.G.
 
That’s the real question, and in a general way easy enough
to answer: work. In one capacity or another. Rest implying
 
from work, play a form of not-work.
Of course, as so often, the answer was unsatisfactory: what is work?
 
My mother said, It’s what pays the rent.
My father said, It’s what takes up valuable time better employed.
 
Employed? Isn’t employment work?
Of course it’s work, barks my father, glaring from his canvas.
 
He’s wearing thick socks and clogs, but his feet are still cold.
He hates deducting time from – Well, that’s the question.
 
I push my chair back, stretch, reach for my poncho.
And if time is where we start . . . .
 
I cross the rushing river of West Houston into Soho, where
the small enterprises are closing down. Buildings stand half-empty.
 
The streets are quiet canyons beyond the Village bustle.
These walking moments could not be claimed as gainful employment.
 
(My mother had introduced a new fork in the road.
My father had pointed out gain’s implication of loss – but turned back
 
to his painting when I inquired, and the rent?)
Trying to work things out as I drift along deserted Thompson,
 
Broome, Mercer, Greene – past the wall where somebody
has painted windows, one with a raised sash.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in earlier version in Stand Vol 21 (4), 2024

 
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Eighth Street, 1969

A man stands in a cone of yellow light,
spinning knives, spinning knives. It’s mesmeric –
riffs from a trumpet, people surging by,
block so alive. A new climacteric –
Manhattan after years abroad. The bookshops
are lavish palaces of the mind’s desire,
the street an unfolding window where I shop –
and desires abound, not just of the mind.
 
Late one hot night, walking home from work,
a vision in the gutter stops me: a load
of Spanish onions. A mocking fairy smirks
Take all you can carry! Beautiful as gold . . . .
You can only carry – no bag or overshirt –
seven Spanish onions in a mini-skirt.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in earlier version in ARTEMISpoetry Issue 32, May 2024

 
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