Padlocks

Do not be upset if I tell you
your love is a burden to me
and much too grounding.

I am not the calmest woman.
You could have chosen somebody else.

You tell me your love is endless
but time is running out.

The difference is not beginning
it is already here,
rolling over everything,

I won't point out the details.

I do not know what you see in me,
how loving me shapes your life.

My father once told me,
rise early, be a morning woman,
feel the sun begin, know
the light as it wakes the world.

Let your husband be responsible for night.

Keep quiet but know the language
of your conscience.
Tell the truth, go there.

Avoid darkness.
Leave midnight to your husband.

Become a domestic animal,
recognize the sound of a weak branch
as it crackles with the wind.
Prepare for storms, come well equipped,
head off disaster with charm.

Don't tangle emotions.
Triumph in the first kiss of dawn.
Know your place.

It's not your duty to understand politics.
Let your husband solve the problems
in the basement.

Oh, but darling, my father was wrong.
Midnight comes peeping through the curtains
and I'm interested.

I don't want to separate the light from the dark.
I want to endure the same tortures.
I don't want to martyr,
I don't want to make a souffle,
I don't want to languish in absent-mindedness.

I was lying awake in bed
as a full moon scraped its nails
against the window.

I went out to meet it.
Do not be upset when you wake up tomorrow
and I am not the same woman you married.

My father tried to prepare me
for love like yours,
cloistered, run by a control panel, my mind
cut, my soul broken away from me.

I was a girl who obeyed her father.
I am now a woman of flight.

- lisa zaran

Reservations

I've never read a poem
that offered a cure,
though the voices rise and fall,
their images of comfort
are often mishaped.

So down we go.

I've never heard a song
that served as an antibiotic
to my infected heart.
The melody is plain,
the chorus too bony.

And down through the startling
passage of a dream we go.

I wake with the same dull
and thorny throb in my chest
as I went to sleep with.
Limping through the day,
this ruin of heaviness
has given me a permanent backache.

I've never known a clear road
where the fog distinctly lifts
so I'm not blinded, feeling first
with my heart and then with my hands.

Down we go.

Sorrow is the first gift he ever gave me.
Sorrow is the want that rattles
like a tedious ambition, edging me forward,
moving me on.

I wake from dreams I'm oblivious to.
I open the door to a world filled with
too many others' needs. I enter it anyway.

And down I go.

- lisa zaran

Ironies

The image I have of him-
driving, tempered not
by his foot on the pedal
or his hands on the wheel,
but by the road itself.

Abandoned fruit stands,
self-made wooden crosses,
the occasional jackrabbit
scurrying along the highway
are all that break up the scenery.

He uses the sunlight as his wristwatch,
the language of certain stars
guide his path by night.
Everything he owns he carries
with him. A change of clothes,
wallet stripped of all its worth
and her photograph.

After ten years of this,
although he could go on,
another lifetime or two,
the stalwart angel of death
is sent. He goes, not willingly.
Begrudgingly, he sits up in bed,
fiddles with his reading glasses,
mends with caution the torn words
of a manuscript.

Sips his coal-black coffee
and contemplates. Does he feel
a certain sense of relief
knowing he has a bed, a roof,
three daughters who love him
or is this just a temporary rest?

Decline doesn't change a thing.
The sunlight is still somebody's
wristwatch, the highway still
carries a man as far as he
could ever want to go, further
perhaps then he initially intended.
The angel of death still steps
into traffic without warning
to put an end to the shadowy road.

- lisa zaran

Desire

I wish I weren't
so in love with you.

As a girl, I fell in love
with the idea of love,
watching the secret
fretting my mother did

Waiting for her man,
waiting on her man.
Always waiting,
parting her mouth.

I wish my nights
weren't so consumed
by dreams.

Illusive, promiscuous dreams
of him. Never to completion.

Waking alone with my legs ajar.

- lisa zaran





Rapture

Over one thousand days ago
I met a man made of belonging.

Airy as an angel, fountain-like
wings which he used to cocoon
my body.

His body, an armored furnace.
A spirit who had taken the form
of a human. A vesture of emotion

escaped from my lips. A wet sigh
as I realized I could not separate
rapture from misery. Sifting

through the scripture of his
pearl spined feathers, I found
myself doubting his plight

of devotion. Then I awoke.

- lisa zaran





Ever

I wish you.
Honest I do.

This is the way I wish you:
part old, part young,
part whole, part broken.

Like Patsy Cline
I wish you would
fall
to
pi
eces

over me.

I should walk away
but, I don't.

- lisa zaran





If Air Is Air, Then Breath Is Love

in the sad and sudden darkness of night,
the rain is falling like ropes,
the wind is spelling disaster,
the sky is testing our faith.

i'm green. i'm grass.
i'm tree and cutting leaf.

women-girl's go out walking.
they wear scented perfume
and white t-shirts to see through.
they wear straight, stage-curtain hair.

i'm cold. i'm wet.
i'm hollow.

watching their legs. moonlight kathleen.
mary the stars and heather the grey sky.

talent in their steps.
wisdom in their swiveling hips.
a world of education. a universe.

red red lips. blonde blonde hair.
blue blue eyes. and mouth's so
perfect you imagine kissing them.

i'm air. i'm wind.
i'm lust.

in the fantasy of the man returning,
the man always returns.

to put a shake in your bones
and a wince in your walk.

- lisa zaran