:

MELODRAMA

Those times turning myself into a tornado.

The men I saw

like luminescent figures

in a flat landscape.

Sometimes on Saturday morning

I'd watch them pass

and dream of being touched.

The men with hard edges

stepping out of the misty crowd.

But now the soft focus is dissolved.

The landscape has come into focus

and filled itself in with

a job, a man who's kind,

a friend, an evening alone.

I step into the landscape

and those tears dry up.

I tuck the men under my arm

like a newspaper.

The list is endless, brief.

The line from my heart to their bodies

Shrank

and I saw the map around it--

I saw the line become a road to somewhere.

I lose myself in the towns.

--Ruth Lepson

The woman looks at her calendar and then out the window.

Flocks of an unspecified bird

shoot into the white air.

The paintings are beginning to chip.

Only the clothing, swaying in mid-afternoon,

freshly ironed, is peaceful.

There is a house, and a small yard.

Not something she's forgotten

but, rather,

something she's forgotten how to do.

--Ruth Lepson

May, 1977/What She Wants/