3 Poems by Richard Fein

Three Poems by

Richard Fein

HEARD IN QUICK PASSING

Couple arm in arm approach.
She is at least six months along.
His eyes dreamily follow an iridescent butterfly
flying under an oppressively clear blue sky.
His woman's belly is a curved fullness.
Her face is angular and pretty.
He holds on tight to his earth mother goddess
strolling through this botanical garden in Spring,
the season for such divine beings to stir.
But she is biting a bloody lip,
and no dreamy smile is on her face.
This phalanx of two ignores my approach.
How can I pass?
But suddenly she pushes his arm aside
and does an awkward pirouette.
I pass through this broken unity.
The iridescent butterfly flies from his vision to mine
and dances directly in front of me.
Behind me I hear a whisper.
Behind me I hear soft sobs.
"Don, the baby isn't yours, isn't yours."

FECUND FIELD SEDUCTION

In these acres her fingers, yellow with pollen,
stroked the stamens of dozens of roses,
as she watched her father mate chickens with cocks
and cross bouquets of apple blossoms
into every manner of luscious fruit.

She raised her face, closed her eyes, and inhaled the grass scent
as if it were a bouquet of vintage wine.
But she was a connoisseur of country meadows
She had lived here till her parents sold the farm.
He drove her here but got lost twice.
For the last few miles, the redolent air guided her as she guided him.
Headily, she kicked off her sandals and dug her toes into the earth.
Afraid of animal droppings, he kept his shoes on.
She knelt and bent her head forward, draping her hair over her face.
Her long brown strands flowed into the tall green blades
so a seamless fabric swayed in the breeze.
But it was late. The car was parked on a gravel road.
She picked a blade and notched it with her fingernail,
then blew across the coarse grass harp playing an out-of-tune nursery rhyme.
He also tried, but coughed when he sucked in a blade.
She tapped his back till the coughing stopped.
The car, the car on the gravel road. "Was it late already?" he wondered.
Then she leaned against the crotch of two large tree branches and stroked the
rough bark.
He felt tingling on his skin.
She brushed her hair aside and smiled.
He wondered, the car, the car?
Her eyes replied, "Who cares."
Evening.
His bare feet sank into that childhood meadow.

And then it was her turn, her turn–
she sought a genesis in this soil.

ALL POSSIBLE PEOPLE

This empty avenue is populated by all possible people, myself and a rush-hour crush of phantoms. Myself as phantom, myself as real, for like everyone else I'm a wispy spur off a string of causalities— those threads of parallel universes woven into a fabric of being.

I'm the result of a choice made by a past someone I never knew. Perhaps a would-be husband was too shy to ask for the hand of his beloved or some ancient parents refused a bride's dowry so generations of children were suddenly unborn, while new infants appeared and cried for milk as men had other wives and women other husbands.

Square dancing to the whim of the caller, victims and murderers do their eternal do-si-dos. One holocaust is avoided but another becomes history. Wars are fought or never fought. The devout now bow to the North, West, East, or South or bow to no gods at all depending on the prophets their ancestors chose to follow.

And this empty avenue is mobbed by phantom citizens of countless chronologies cascading from infinite contingencies. They surround me. They pass through me. Anyone of them could even morph into me, these phantoms, these angels or demons. And I pass invisible through their worlds as they pass through mine— Except I feel them; I hear them breathing somewhere. Even now they are making choices. My own choices are as meaningful as lint brushed off a sleeve or momentous enough to unstitch the seams of the universe.

Right now one of these phantoms is being judged. His afterlife has just begun. At last he can see me, not down from heaven or up from hell but apart from his former existence, apart from the fabric of all existence. I was one of his possibilities. He studies me and sighs with either longing or relief, and that is his judgment and also mine.

Richard Fein (aka bardofbyte), currently a resident of Brooklyn, has been published in many print and web journals. Selections from his poetry and photography can be found on bardofbyte's Poetry Page and bardofbyte's Photos.

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