Lisa Russ Spaar
3 poems
Bald-faced Hornet Madrigal
A pate moon flares the upper stories
of early November as sun’s last blear
stirs the paving pine needles hushed
with private gold, a carpeted deck I cross,
upturning at the garden-bench a pot,
clay fez, find inside, still hitched, pendant,
a fist of old comb, hexagonal, obscene,
papery eyelets, gray wig, surely the old queen
eaten by now, the seething cabal quiet,
abandoned, easy to poke out with a stick
but then this lone piebald drill-bit catarrh
driven by superannuated venum, strikes sugar,
wrist, the sheltering urn in shards, & its last kill—
desiccated bee carcass—falling also, imbecile.
Lady Bird Taint Madrigal
In the derring-do capes of Hallowe’en
or fidgety old-world widow weeds,
in masses they ribbon windows, trunks,
the south side of anything, bargaining,
bustling, as diapausal days commence
& paper-thin frost locks down the lawn.
What penultimate forces drove my mother,
demented, to speak, on her last day, a blurry
exhausting word salad? Who can say?
How do we get as far as we do, astray
as these spotted garnet beetles, black masked,
infiltrating even the hair’s-breadth cracks of casks,
bladder presses, winery batches lost forever
to notes of rancid nut butter, instinct, rotted dearth?
Tristesse Madrigal
Morning after, a black crow,
parsonly, struts the driveway,
dips into a divot’s catch of rain
its Aesopian beak. Shadows shift
in shape of sycamores, Corinthian tops
raving in wind their emerald tatting.
Clouds condense sky. Sirens cry.
In a ditch, flies silver a fallen doe.
Most of all, this dent against matted fence,
nest some rabbits made in winter,
meuse, old word for the bodymark
animals make, bedding down.
Absence blue as the prophet’s cloak.
Secret muse that fills my throat.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author and editor of over ten books of poems and essays, most recently OREXIA: POEMS (Persea, 2017) and more truly and more strange: Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems (Persea, 2019). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She is professor of English at the University of Virginia.