SKATING AT MENOTOMY POND
Between Monotony and Metonymy
we make our rounds near night.
The snowless ice is the color of new ash.
The shift of blades cracks through the empty trees.
Our shoes lie as deserted villages on the bank.
The circle is swift and neat.
Our silhouettes glaze the blank air.
Call this the world.
Call our lives the time in it.
*
DECOMISSIONING NIELSEN LIBRARY, SMITH COLLEGE, AFTER RENOVATION
There is a five-dollar starting bid for the mid-century arm chairs
where I fell asleep trying to read 400 pages a week
of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Here is one of the mahogany display cabinets
in which I gazed at the hand-wrought drafts
of Sylvia Plath’s “Bees” on pink Smith College memo paper,
and these are the lion-footed oak tables
where I began a poem about I don’t know what
under these two-armed, green-hooded, brass table lamps.
This tabletop statue of winged Nike, goddess of Victory,
seems not to have been inspirational, given my many failures.
Next, there is an odd mahogany-framed print
of the Waterfront of Antwerp, (who deemed that necessary?)
and the old, wooden chalkboard on wheels, dusty trayed,
with thirty bids by women who remember wistfully
the emphatic scrape of chalk erased by a professor’s sleeve.
Here is an etching of Chartres at which I stared
elbow on a book, composing myself.
Here are the three-shelved carts where women
who had enough ideas for a thesis gathered their books
on Robert Browning or the Bauhaus
while I sat at one of those heavy, lion-footed tables,
and began to work on that poem I finished just now.
*
Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. Her work has been published in such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Paterson Literary Review and others. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and original published in the Tipton Review. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.
