SUSAN: A Portrait
I
Her face speaks of Monet
and suspends the moment in undiscovered colors:
a stone for all eternity,
as pure as bone,
as crisp as china.
The essence of flesh:
a powder lighter than talc,
yet more potent than pollen,
etherizes every organ
and makes me forget I am alive.
Housed within is the frame if a figure,
too moist and perfect to be adulterated by song and dance,
by magic and witchcraft.
It knows only light and gives it to all in a smile of childhood,
too fragile to speak,
too honest for innocence.
II
Feline fingers embrace the evening.
Still claws, as soft as oyster shells, grip the darkness.
Light drips from a saturated moon.
Sand flows through her knuckles.
The night drowns in the salt of passion.
A mystique that flows as soft as warm milk
through an open door.
III
I am home now.
The smell of cinnamon calls the boy in from play.
A mother's love is never shattered.
The cave, though vacant,
will soon bear children.
She will cradle them in her arms.
The blanket still holds a piece of the moon.
The night, which cried out to Aphrodite,
calls again and says, "Mother, I am home now."
Of yesterday
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
--T.S. Eliot, East Coker
Of yesterday,
she remembers nothing.
Broken tooth, nail, and bone.
All shards of what was,
dissolved in the abyss of the here and now.
The child is not recollected.
She is a watercolor,
saturated by the here and now and the what must be.
The dog trods damp grass.
He stands by the drain,
but is only remembered in the context of coffee-colored film.
Of yesterday,
she only remembers now.
John Tamillo III of the Salem State College Learning Center and English
Department also teaches at Endicott College and North Shore Community College.
A muscian working on his first book of poetry, Tamillo, a Salem State graduate
now earning a second masters' degree at Andover Newton Theological School
has recently been accepted into the Doctor of Education program at the University
of Massachusetts Lowell.