Annalise

Blue Ridge




By Ellen Bryant Voigt


Up there on the mountain road, the fireworks

blistered and subsided, for once at eye level:

spatter of light like water flicked from the fingers;

the brief emergent pattern; and after the afterimage bled

from the night sky, a delayed and muffled thud

that must have seemed enormous down below,

the sound concomitant with the arranged

threat of fire above the bleachers.

I stood as tall and straight as possible,

trying to compensate, trying not to lean in my friend’s

direction. Beside me, correcting height, he slouched

his shoulders, knees locked, one leg stuck out

to form a defensive angle with the other.

Thus we were most approximate

and most removed.

In the long pauses

between explosions, he’d signal conversation

by nodding vaguely toward the ragged pines.

I said my children would have loved the show.

He said we were watching youth at a great distance,

and I thought how the young

are truly boring, unvaried as they are

by the deep scar of doubt, the constant afterimage

of regret—no major tension in their bodies, no tender

hesitation, they don’t yet know

that this is so much work, scraping

from the self its multiple desires; don’t yet know

fatigue with self, the hunger for obliteration

that wakes us in the night at the dead hour

and fuels good sex.


Of course I didn’t say it.

I realized he watched the fireworks

with the cool attention he had turned on women

dancing in the bar, a blunt uninvested gaze

calibrating every moving part, thighs,

breasts, the muscles of abandon.

I had wanted that gaze on me.

And as the evening dwindled to its nub,

its puddle of tallow, appetite without object,

as the men peeled off to seek

the least encumbered consolation

and the women grew expansive with regard—

how have I managed so long to stand among the paired

bodies, the raw pulsing music driving

loneliness into the air like scent,

and not be seized by longing,

not give anything to be summoned

into the larger soul two souls can make?

Watching the fireworks with my friend,

so little ease between us,

I see that I have armed myself;

fire changes everything it touches.


Perhaps he has foreseen this impediment.

Perhaps when he holds himself within himself,

a sheathed angular figure at my shoulder,

he means to be protective less of him

than me, keeping his complicating rage

inside his body. And what would it solve

if he took one hand from his pocket,

risking touch, risking invitation—

if he took my hand it would not alter

this explicit sadness.

The evening stalls,

the fireworks grow boring at this remove.

The traffic prowling the highway at our backs,

the couples, the families scuffling on the bank

must think us strangers to each other. Or,

more likely, with the celebrated fireworks thrusting

their brilliant repeating designs above the ridge,

we simply blur into the foreground,

like the fireflies dragging among the trees

their separate, discontinuous lanterns.

Love and Friendship




By Emily Brontë


Love is like the wild rose-briar,

Friendship like the holly-tree—

The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms

But which will bloom most constantly?


The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,

Its summer blossoms scent the air;

Yet wait till winter comes again

And who will call the wild-briar fair?


Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now

And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,

That when December blights thy brow

He still may leave thy garland green.

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