Alicia Ostriker
3 poems
ANYTHING IN MOTION
The small girl in the park runs ahead of the mother
skipping jumping and giggling
looking back over her shoulder
to make sure the mother is still there
because what if she is gone
I like seeing her do this her mother likes it
it makes the mother smile`
the older brother also smiles
because he loves her I can surmise
he is a sweet boy who truly loves her
I try to imagine them painted by Monet in
one of his pastoral scenes
but Monet does not paint anything in motion I
don’t have my camera with me
what I have is my eyes my consciousness
NOCTURNE
A man sleeps in his car
in the fast food parking lot
a cop knocks on his window
the man is passive as a peony
gets out of the car hands over
his papers without complaint
does the breathalyser quietly
the cop leans over the man’s ear
begins to arrest him
parking lot lights cast
pale yellow on bare asphalt
video camera gazes
suddenly the man fights
like a tiger struggles free runs
is shot dies we wonder
was it the handcuffs
drove the man wild like that or
something else
perhaps we can guess what word
the police officer whispered
in that black man’s ear
that night
GOLDBERG VARIATIONS IN DOUBLE-PLAGUE TIME
Bach on an odd traditional instrument, half lute
half keyboard, streams at me from my small
widescreen. This famous frolic, this epic banter
composed in an age of science, an age of enlightenment,
arrives in a time of pandemic, coupled with tribal
malignancy and violence to which it proposes the remedy of
pattern and variation. The horizon blown in the wind will
always recede, the pattern will always vary.
The piece is being performed by a handsome Chinese youth in
a Regency sitting room. The chair seats are burgundy velvet
and it takes perhaps thirty minutes to perform the quick and slow, the
gorgeous, the elaborate, the ingenious variations.
Curled on my living room sofa I listen and imagine
this music performed in the home of an opulent Hapsburg burgher
whose perfumed wife has composed the guest list
and whose perfumed guests are not permitted to be restless.
The ghost of Bach in my living room requests
that my husband and I also be quiet and pay attention. Now
too everything changes and remains the same.
Listen. Now too in glory the world revolves.
Alicia Ostriker has published nineteen books and chapbooks of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. Her most recent poetry collections are Waiting for the Light (2017) and The Volcano Sequence and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019 (2020), published by University of Pittsburgh Press. She was the State Poet of New York from 2018-2021.