Poems by Karen Greenbaum-maya

For the College Friend Who Stopped Writing Poetry

A charm bracelet of gold, 10-carat veneer. If you wear it long enough, the shine flakes off, your skin turns blackish green. First charm, a leaf, because Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. A tiny pair of scissors, linked to the chain, for sewing, or for picking at affectionate bonds. A teensy Starship Enterprise, modeling gifted folks from many backgrounds—like us!—but united. A heart. Just a heart. Stylized, metallic. A feather, meant to be a quill, for her astounding writing. (It’s gold, it doesn’t work.) Back then she already knew what a poem was. She’d been steeped in the poetry of argument her whole life, her poet mother, her lawyer father, their divorce. She spoke the language of language. I was one feather still sprouting from its sheath on a bare wing, she was fully fledged. Next, a crucifix. She asked her Anglican priest:  was she blaspheming, to write, to create, like God? Now I think, more like hubris to ask the question. Next on the bracelet, a knife and fork, because both stab to hold in place. The hasp, to close the circle.

Widow as Sleeping Beauty

After my husband died, I went to sleep.
The spindle bit me and I mostly dreamed,
subdued and restful, knocked out, not too deep.
Potential suitors never found me home.

But then you launched yourself against my hedge.
I didn’t notice what you were about.
You tried and tried again, until a smidge
of sparkle woke me, and two was no crowd.

So from my widow’s coma I was roused.
I laughed with you, I smiled, I stretched a hand.
Then suddenly you didn’t understand
why I should seek you. Out of line, somehow.

Should I now pine, pursue you, or regret?
Much easier if we had never met.

At Last

Insulation flakes
from nerves’ live wire,
brings us up short.
So welcome, how all will be lost:

The jabbering needs
of the cranky carcass—
all that conversation, just gone.
No one now will ever look to find
those sardonic Russian-green eyes
looking back from a child’s face.
Then we shall all rejoice.
free of wanting what cannot happen.

All lines go extinct,
precious and solid, or faulted as mountains.
All is smooth, all is gone.
Just this once, to settle in. To laze and wait.

Life skitters, squirrel on a power line,
frisking until synapses snap,
untying the webbing
that held hard-won thoughts in place.
Now they tumble, they float
out of the drowsing grasp.
At last. At last.