Nanette Rayman: Two Poems
Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again | You Fell

Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again

—(W.B. Yeats)

You were begotten in a meadow with disturbed hawkweed hair
Oh, where is my violin, I can't compose a thing on weeds
except more weeds. I would have loved you more as weeds multiply.
The weeds are pricklier than me, nervous to seed, nimble
under the muted heckle-moon.

Quick turn of my head and you broke from my hand
as unitemized wind slaughtered my womb.
My hands ache in bee-swarmed colors: create, can't create
for you. I find, stretched in the goblin arms of maiden-grass,
the zig-zag of squirrels, vermillion blooms down their heads.
I find your eyes so deep, explorers with compasses would lose track.

Months my hands are cut off, lie here like comas,
unfed and atrophied, heated to trace your face.
Hands can't touch your white shoes and sash as they grow dimmer,
The orchid pinned to your black suede hair.
I am hoarding each white petal of grief for ransom, for hands.

You Fell

Crimson like the smell of strawberries
burning in Diaspora, more vermillion
in the winter fog, shriveled with the inversion
of time.

I used your absence up,
wasted it all in longing.

A weight in the scent of spice,
in the sienna smoke of Winstons,
the moon hiding, I know where,
in your face, or is that an excessive gesture?

You
my handsome Walter Matthau
I see your face. Rain slides into it
and hangs there. Your eyes dart in rainbows
against Mum's theatre of raging lip.
An inmate face.

Your words, your teachings
deep in me,
are held on to like Van Gogh's
starry Starry Night, tea-rose sun
over Painted Desert, me shellacked
to your shoulders in Dennisport waves.

I see your blind faith
hunched and gray near the bima.
Then it was me wandering in to find you,
all peacock eyes aflash in green ash.

You fell into the winter fog
and the smell of strawberries,
black grains of teaching, humid
as the soil around plants.
The synagogue windows sodden and shut.

Poet's Biography:

Nanette Rayman's poetry has been published in NetAuthor's E2K, Circle Magazine, The Doomed City Journal, The American Muse, Comrades, Comrades Anthology (Uno), Disquieting Muses, Stirring, The Concrete Wolf, Dakota House Journal, Wired Arts for Wired Hearts, Tyro's Pen, Remark, Poetry Motel, PoetryMagazine, 5_Trope, Poetry SuperHighway as Poet of the Week twice, and elsewhere. Upcoming publications include Octavo, Remark and Wired Arts for Wired Hearts. Her fiction has been published in Onyx Journal, Attic, Comrades and Carve magazine. She also received an honorable mention in the Writer's Digest Fiction 2000 contest. An actor, she has appeared in many off-off Broadway shows.