Alison Luterman

Interlude

At the heart of all our ponderous work
is a loud silence. Some stillness
in the midst of the busy. As when
the teacher says,
Now write for fifteen minutes,
and the class falls to, bent
over their notebooks -- you can hear
the scritch-scratch of pens, a last whispered
flirt or giggle, the jiggle
of butts against seats, and, far away,
the sigh of cars on the freeway.

If you listen, you can hear
the pregnant woman dully sucking ice
halfway through an eighteen-hour labor.
You can hear the guy on the stalled power mower
breathe a moment before cursing and wiping his face.

In the end, all our striving
comes to nothing. You knew that
already. And in the middle. You knew that too.

The secretary, lulled into trance by the screen savers' hum,
gazes out the window, twisting her earring,
and forgets for a moment all the details
of her upcoming wedding,
forgets even the name of her fiancé.

All our lives
we hear the roar
of that silence and we thrash against it,
as the baby in the womb thrashes
toward the waiting nipple and the enormous light.

Green

Everything looks new
this last week of spring rains:
lime-bright Swedish ivy;
ice plant, with its fat, light leaves.

I'm too tired to step
out of the car. All last night
wind worried the screen door,
banging it back and forth, and my dreams

were full of fearful calculations:
how long will the old furnace hold out,
and who will love me when I break?
You can't eat

color; you can't put it
in an envelope to the tax man, or the mechanic.
But it was there to greet us in the morning
when Makendra needed me

to drive her to work. We listened
to Nas rap on the radio
about future generations
and noticed how storms had washed the world clean

for a minute. A million
shades of green -- chartreuse, forest,
mint -- you could never
catalog them all, not if you spent a lifetime.

What a beautiful,
unfixable mess I'm in,
with little idea how to cross
this wide, wild water,

or whose rough hands will pull me over.