Anne Whitehouse

After the Performance
 
for Lauren Flanigan                                               
 
The stage was a vast seashell
where music like water left
a taste of salt, a fairyland
alive with malicious laughter,
and she its source--
limpid beauty with a demon's tongue,
a mermaid who swam in from the sea.
 
Silver hair freed, soaked
and plastered to her head,
her shining face scrubbed of make-up,
in black sweats she goes out
to walk her dog that patiently
waited all this time.
 


Blessing XIV
 
The island sparkles in the sun
in the last mornings of summer,
as if it has dipped back
into the dark blue sea
and been washed overnight.
The grass tastes of salt,
sunlight glitters on the leaves
of bushes and trees and vines,
and the sand and stones
and earth all are damp.
 
Long-limbed just lately,
our girl runs through the yard,
with her dreamy smile,
her busy mind,
alive to her unfolding self.
 
Two days and nights before,
the island was lashed by rain.
In darkness we awoke
to the downpour
and embraced for dear life.
The rain fell around us,
hiding the moon and stars
and battering our little house,
and we remembered
an afternoon
in Venice long ago,
when running for cover
from a sudden cloudburst,
we were surprised by a man
singing of love
as he stood under the awning
of a restaurant
in the streaming summer;
as we crossed the piazza,
he opened his arms
and smiling gazed
into our eyes,
as if dedicating
his song to us.


 
Twin Dancers
 
After the twins fed the alpacas
and walked them around the pen,
brother and sister would sit in silence
perched on the fence, watchful
in the New Mexican desert,
the only children for miles around.
 
A decade later, transformed
into tall and graceful dancers--
a stillness lingers about them.
Within their movements, a space opens,
revealing a further space beyond.

Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, and Being Ruth Asawa. She is the author of a novel, FALL LOVE. Her poem, “Lady Bird,” won the Nathan Perry DAR 2023 “Honoring American History” poetry contest. She has lectured about Longfellow and Poe at the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, and Longfellow House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.