By Johanna Keller

Don't ask, my love. The lights are out. Purblind,
We grope for wicks and matches, settle in
And ask the ouiji board about the wind.
You read our horoscopes to pass the time.

We talk of this strange winter and its blight
Of illnesses, betrayals and remorse—
A slow cancer death, a sudden divorce,
And that obituary you must write.

Our old house creaks with bathing-suited ghosts.
You say: "We have a year—no more—of beach."
And then the gnawing waves begin to reach
The porch and pull at the supporting posts.

As you slip on your red silk dressing gown,
Two garnet goblets sparkle in the light.
In one another's arms we seize the night
And hour by hour the candle's burning down.

Published in The Dark Horse (Scotland), Fall 97

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On 57th Street I heard "A Furtive Teardrop"

By Johanna Keller

The first time I found the great hall,
I spotted him. I came up breathless
to touch its caramel stone and there he was
singing Una furtiva lagrima.

He cracked on top and I,
a fellow singer, thought:
He looks Italian but he needs some lessons.
And I put three dollars in his cup
at a time when that was dinner.

Later, when I worked in an office
across the street from Carnegie Hall,
I came to know he was not hopeful,
only crazy. The Carnegie people
ran him off, moved him
near the art store. He's still there,
but I think of him where he used to be.

A few years ago, he started chanting
platitudes—I figured missionaries
had saved him. But the other day
when I was passing, I stopped and stood
listening to his ragged sound
until I made out Donizetti
and knew where I was.

Published in Nimrod, Spring 96

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OX-BOWS

By Johanna Keller

The hooves of a thirsty beast might have stamped
these parentheses in mud. C's and U's
spell what the mazy flow has left behind,
the wendings discarded for direct ways.
This river scores the prairie's tender hand,
a curved lifeline plaited with oxbow lakes.
Light glisters the hooks of estranged water,
like horseshoes lost, a bronze boat overturned,
or the crescent moon unable to rise.

Grain by grain, land records seasons of flood
and drought, choke of slow wash, the loess and drift
of migrating shoals, tearing down, building up,
and tearing down. A soil embankment holds,
then splits to trickle and swash, a freshet
rushes through the notch and cascades to gurge,
mud flume surges until the deeper place
is filled and the current slows. Newly sliced,
the island waits to be rejoined to strand
by drain and silt, while the waves lick cutbanks
to precariousness, to plummet, pull
the shore to another tortuous path.

Water reverts to earth: blue pond to brown
to algae, squelchy bog thickens with reeds
to wallow, to chughole, fallow and field.
Beyond bandy banks and lakes, green shadows
of lakes overlap, fishscales in bottomland.
The plow respects this healed terrain and draws
its sinuous furrows in sickle shapes.
The pewter road obeys what has occurred,
and twists and turns as if it held stained glass.
These verdant scars—lush earthen oxbows—prove
more fertile than land never cut. Half-rings
remember decisions, abandonings,
the rich alluvia yoke the river—
so restless and forgetful—to the past.

Published in Southwest Review, Fall 97