Barbara Daniels
The River
The river slides through a kitchen, through a cramped living room, pulling foam like spun sugar out of a broken chair. It touches a tilting table, a thin wallet, lifts them and carries them. A single star is an eye for the river. Restless is fine. It’s OK to keep roaring. A drunk woman blows froth from her beer glass. Ducks hurry forward, dive and return; their shadows mottle the water. The woman who paints in the nude lifts her brush. The river never pours itself out. Being itself is easy. It plunges forward, loosing a horse of lather to leap in the foam.
Reading the Dead
My bed lamp steadily cranes itself, beyond it a man sliding his hand nearly silently, checking the nib of his pen, shifting his blotter. Sometimes I write the year of a death on a flyleaf. I do this in pencil. I could erase it. Suicides cast their nets of anxiety back over print, novels rocking in seas of despair, each poem a shadow dance urgently telling me what must come next. Old paperbacks, completely exhausted, let clumps of pages cascade from their spines. I pull my arms close to my body, tense as I read, willing writers to take back the kitchen knife, the clouds of blue gas, winch themselves out of their coffins. I hear them whisper, mouthing the words. They rub their eyes, drink more hot coffee. Writing saved them while it could, heart’s ease of ink, what they built with it, the way they were almost home.
Barbara Daniels’ book, Rose Fever, was published by the Cherry Grove imprint of WordTech Press in 2008. She completed an MFA in poetry at Vermont College, received two Individual Artist Fellowships from New Jersey, and was awarded a full fellowship from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to the Vermont Studio Center.
