Tag: Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

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PHOTOGRAPH

It’s almost Giacomettish of you,
your rather persistent disinclination

toward the up-close photo
of us that I often ask for as we travel.

As though it held less truth
than untruth as we lean against a sycamore,

or sit across a white linen table
where the great invisible

distance that is alive and well between
any two people, no matter how much love,

has once again slipped past undetected
by the dull instrument of the camera.

That great invisible distance
that Giacometti wanted to show

when he positioned his models standing
a few feet from him as he worked

but strove to make viewers perceive them
as from a point farther away.

And that these dual perspectives
hold each other in perfect balance

like two children on a seesaw,
neither pair of feet

touching the dusty ground. It’s almost
Giacomettish of you,

when I ask a friendly tourist
to snap a picture of us,

a once in a lifetime shot to remember
the two of us overlooking

the giant maw of Vesuvius
that erupted those

many millennia ago,
and you once again, refuse.

*

On The Swimmer by Pablo Picasso

Orange figure in blue water,
arms flung out like wings,

female, in freefall, letting the water
hold you any way it wants.

The paint brushed thinly
as if it too were floating. And after

swimming, when you lie
on sun-warmed shale,

I imagine each drying water bead
as the remains of that second skin

that had held you, everywhere,
as only the water can,

loved even your miserable parts.
Stuck its wet tongue all over

into the very smallest spaces,
those most difficult

to open that you had allowed
yourself to forget.

*

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

after a painting by Rose Wylie

Before they razed the hedge, I did not see it.
What I saw—just the warm brown
of wood-slatted fence and reaching green

from the other side. I’m a painter. I was held
by those colors, did not even imagine
a domicile with other humans.

Each morning, the wrens, round as notes
in the dry brush from last autumn.
The house is yellow. It does not cheer me

with its single black window
like an eye gone dark.
But oh, how I love the brown

tall tree that leans towards the house next door.
And that I can paint away from the truth:
that this tree is rooted firmly

on my side of the fence and could not
crush that house were it to fall.

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at the 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor-at Large for Plume Poetry journal. Her poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award.

Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

GRANDSON AT TWO

He runs to me, falls in my arms, laughing
again and again—a game we play

while my daughter makes his lunch.
He never tires—

Each time his laughter clacks and clatters, leaps
from him like a mythical bird and rises wet-feathered

from the albumen of the egg,
then flies from his lips—

becoming many mythical birds
stringing themselves in the air,

and the explosions of pleasure seed
their own field somewhere

in the distance where he will return long after
I have gone, the tight tufts of purple

clover, the daisies and black-eyed Susans.

*

MY DAUGHTER, PREGNANT WITH HER SECOND CHILD

To grow a bunch of bananas, it takes nine months.

I see you in the banana’s pinkish-lavender blossom,
petals smooth as a silken sheet,

that appears in the sixth or seventh month,
shaped like an elongated human heart.

You are standing, hands clasped, arms straight,
centered in front of your belly,

and the cupola, the dome of fingers intertwined,
points towards the ground as though

your entire body stood in slender prayer.
From the banana blossom’s petals

spring tiny tubular flowers, each group
called a hand, each flower,

a finger—in her lifetime all that
your own daughter’s hands will hold, recoil from,

or just hang by her sides like indifferent vines.
The banana heart grows from a notched black

stalk that is straight and lengthens towards
the earth like your grandmother’s Sunday cane

beneath her white-gloved hand.
The heart’s petals will fall open

one by one until there is only a fringe
of yellow, decorative, like the hem of a skirt.

*

WOMEN’S VOICES

Ancient Greeks and Romans believed
women had two mouths, an upper and, in the genitalia,
a lower. Both led to a vacant chamber guarded by lips
that are best kept closed.

When women wailed, they were walled
outside the perimeter of the city.

The anatomical deck is stacked against us—
lower voices vibrate in the vocal folds
more slowly as though more

           certain of themselves.

I read that switchboard operators were instructed
to speak slowly to mimic this effect.

That when Margaret Thatcher took voice-
lowering lessons, she was told
to speak as if she had a penis and a cold.

I imagine the lush contours of my daughter’s voice,
vibrations churning through the small bones of her face
as she reads her three-year-old son a story,

the precise notes of my grandmother’s voice
finding their way through the steam as it rose
above her kettle of borscht.

Note: the quote is from Ann Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound”

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at The 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor at-large for Plume Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Dodge, New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, ECHOLOCATION, was on the long list for the Julie Suk Award in 2019.