Diary

Nearing the end of James Schuyler’s diaries,

I fan the corners of the last pages, knowing

there is only a year of intermittent entries left;

I copy one of his tender descriptions of the cat:

Barbara lies stretched against the radiator

as if she has found her long lost mother.

And this quirky weather report: Deliciously

overcast, it is the kind of day in August

that makes you think of a day in autumn

which is like a day in winter, everything

simplified. A ghostly apple wedge presses

my throat—I know in six months the diarist

will be dead. Like the edge that wakes me from

every Mike-dream, that double-world, where I know

my best friend is going to die—in fact, is already

dead. Yet, just now, here, blond, dreamy-eyed,

he was ordering autumn bulbs for the front garden,

choosing William Morris green-on-cream

sun-flower wallpaper for the foyer,

absentmindedly jotting a dinner date—

Jim and Jim—on October’s pale blue calendar.

How Can It Be that I Have Not, Myself

The woman I pass on the street is beautiful in a classical sense:
the kind who motionlessly hands strangers a parcel of her self
wrapped like a new book in brown paper.
(I cannot imagine her on a cell phone:
holistic, gestalt, she is knowable as raw pearls.)
I recognize her browns – eyes,
skirt, jacket, scarf.
Later, I figure it out:
her eyes-mouth remind me of the woman at the bookstore
(every three months or so I drop in
to buy a magazine, a collection of the year’s best, a
newspaper). In turn, the bookseller channels the spirit – the quiet
sorrow – of a teacher from my middle-school years.
A substitute? No, a student-teacher.
But, atypically, not young. Who was there a month
or two. Who gave more than most
in the “new” informal learning style; that is, in moments
paused by each student’s shoulder. (In this way, she encouraged
my poetry about the Brontë’s; dear soul.)

Presence without pressure. A woman-spirit
charged and translucent
(memory confabulates; she’s Charlotte and Emily).
Veering forward to the recent street scene,
I realize the passerby is the bookstore-woman.
And the long-ago teacher.
Every molecule. Without
presumption; which is to say: without need, without
burden.
In all the years I have known, in one incarnation
or another,
those eyes, chin, slender shoulders,
how can it be that I have not, myself, become clearer, kinder?

The Bow Carver’s Daughter Teaches Her to Make Borscht

One of them, older—her house; the other, a junior pre-med, daughter
of a Ukrainian woodcarver hired by string players. Hot at science,
watercolor, one year she played Olga—her namesake—in
The Three Sisters.
All afternoon it rains. They turn off lights, light candles.
Olga lays a bunch of beets, four relaxed puppets, on the counter, asks
for a sharpener: “The blade,” she explains, “makes all the difference”
(her mouth doing that extra “ush” with the “S’s”).
Side by side, holding craggy heads firm, they eagerly chop
stems, commence peeling, and slicing. Fingers, wrists, cutting board
streaked magenta (“Lady Macbeths!”); the girl’s “bea-u-tiful” carving
new shapes in the other’s world.
Later, almost dark, they bow to crisp white flowers—
invisible nod of a traveler to a woman’s lush hours among vases and
books; raspberry-centered, orchid-like. “They’re real!” Olga retracts
her fingers: “Als-troe-meria” the other softly offers.
Then, crossing herself, twice, ending right-to-left, Olga christens
a glistening demitasse of finely chopped garlic “small as Caspian
caviar,” and the two lower spoons into steaming broth.
After, she lifts an album from her bag. Flips
to berry-and-leaf sketches—a violin—arrives at a full length photograph
of a girl, six or seven, unmistakable heart-shaped face. Pale, dark-edged
irises. Already herself, one arm loose at her side, the other raised, grasping
tendrils of birch.
Strands of green serrated hearts. Wisps of hair. Eyes pouring
forward. Lashes. Thirst. All there, coming out.

Priscilla Atkins lives and works in Michigan, where there are blueberry fields, a big lake, no traffic jams and plenty of time to remember childhood in Illinois, college in Massachusetts, teaching in the San Fernando Valley, and shipping a small white car to Hawaii (where she and that very same car lived for ten years). She holds degrees from Smith College, the University of Hawaii and Spalding University (where she earned her MFA). Her poems have appeared in Poetry London, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Raritan, Southwest Review and other journals.