Chrysler Building
Everything served up
on a silver charger.
Even the air conditioning,
even the sink fixtures
hold the peculiar
inevitability of flawless
design. My dreams
are the only hint
I used to have emotions
that knocked the wind out.
Back then I thought art's prerequisite
sequestration in some strange
and godforsaken place. Discordance
and harm. Now I wake up so sad
and then I see the ferry
foaming its way to the dock
or the gleaming headdress
of the Chrysler Building
or the Iditarod of clouds.
And then I make tea
in the double-walled acrylic
tumbler whose lips
are rosepetals
against my lips and
I stretch out my legs
across the taut cowhide ottoman
and simply feel grateful.
Where’s the poetry
in <em>that</em>? my adolescent
nephew once sneered,
as if my every utterance
were obliged to be
an anguished terza rima
howl. I suppose
this all makes me
the middle-aged person
I was always in terror
I’d become. That I don’t even mind
is the horrible proof.
Rapture
I once turned to swan
in the post-office line, the people
waning there with their parcels
and address stickers oblivious
to the enormity and genius
of my wings. Imagine a white
white enough, a tender
tender enough to suffuse you
to a child’s sleep
right on your weary feet—
But the ledgers and the pencils
and the stamps. The daily adhesive.
The bruise and bruise and bruise.
Take heart, oh beautiful people
of the post-office line. I hereby
lend you my ascension.
In my numb and glorious
profusion I enfold you
and your piglet grief.
Melissa Stein's poetry collection Rough Honey won the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty, and was published by American Poetry Review in association with Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis, and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.