Anne Whitehouse

Bad Witch/Good Witch
 
“that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” 
Wordsworth, “The Daffodils”
 
Like a cascade of silken water,
my hair falls over the pool
of the dressing table mirror.
I search my own face,
wondering what I’d hoped to find.
 
Into the green thicket of the past,
I slip inside a fairy tale.
How my grandmother
pointed to the dying light
twinkling in the trees,
showing me the fairies 
I believed in because I wanted to.
 
The first witch was my mother,
sowing dissension, hiding deceit,
plotting ways to set her children
against each other.
It was more than a game,
it was a compulsion.
 
We four sisters and a brother
consumed her poisoned love. 
Every year she grew thinner,
teetering on high heels,
flapping her wings like a crow,
her back curved like a question mark.
 
Her life force fed a fire of trash--
igniting conflicts 
passed down to children
like religious obligations.
 
I shriveled up and dug in,
a hard seed of resistance.                                    
I never could relax my guard--
when I tried, I came to grief--
better not to be noticed,
best of all to leave.
 
I used to dream of the world 
at the back of a mirror, 
as if I could step into it, another Alice,
and the glass would part to take me in,
like dry water. There would be
an interior like a Dutch painting,
the light falling in one direction,
a woman sitting quietly, waiting.
She would look up and nod
when I passed, and let me go.
 


Lost and Found
  
The lost jewelry turned up 
cradled in a seashell 
on my dresser
along with paper clips, 
a state quarter,
and a push pin.
 
At first I thought
its delicate silver dangles
were the mangled ends
of a paper clip
and I almost tossed it.
 
When I realized
I held my earring’s
missing twin
that twice, months apart,
I’d turned the blue case
inside out for
and never found,
I felt a surge
of pure happiness 
for the restored set:
no burden at all
on fragile earlobes,
my lovely, loopy,
frail fronds of silver 
swinging between
soft hair, smooth skin.
 


Dancing in Water
for Eiko and Koma
 
A frame of driftwood 
in the current’s ebb and flow--
clinging to the frame,
the dancers, stiff as driftwood, 
curve slowly into stones
while water runs over 
their stilled forms.
 
In time they come alive,
are rippling reeds,
swaying stem and buried root,
variously wind, tree, 
flower, naked breath
that swells behind 
the push to give birth.
 
The dancers are in the river,
the dance is in the river,
the dance is the river.
 
From outside in I found this story:
she almost died,
and he brought her back to life.
 
Dried leaves, discarded and scattered--
let them go; new ones will grow.
A cricket perched on a twig,
graceful and humorous
at the close.
 


Anne Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, and, most recently, Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020). Ethel Zine and Micro Press published Surrealist Muse, her poem about Leonora Carrington, last year, and, recently, her poem, Escaping Lee Miller, as hand-stitched chapbooks. She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and has been publishing essays about Edgar Allan Poe.