| Two Poems by Terri Witek | ||
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All Together Now A Concert of Birds 1660/1670 attributed to Jan van Kissel I The tiny scene's in "concert" but it's silent—they're just trying not to eat each other. Beak locked, with his glare the owl mocks us, not a hard-rock-candy string of resting songbirds. What it takes merely to hold one's place counts when painting oil on copper, attributing the skittish past, or when a flock, rising from one wire, snaps it like a bowstring skyward across the only power line by which two thousand folks shun winter, flapping closer. It Won't Hurt a Bit St. Sebastian at the Tree Albrecht Durer, 1501 The economy of this Sebastian's in the arrows: they've stopped at the contoured edge of flesh as if Durer meant to martyr someone else but found his burin buried in a man already dead, his wrists cuffed to a tree, limbs limp but furred with fine dark hairs. To these he's added four feathered shafts like pegs a curious passerby might climb toward what—some swaying yellow apples? The whole scene's a creepy triumph of misuse but if by this some pain has been avoided we're as fierce to stay as the burnished sky through which more arrows carom as if there's just one trick, and it's repeatable. _________________________________________________________________________ TERRI WITEK'S poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Antioch Review, The ThreePenny Review, the Southern Review, The New England Review and other journals. Her book about Robert Lowell's revisions for Life Studies, (Click title) Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self was published by the University of Missouri Press,1993. |