For You

For you, I bought new clothes:
linen and silk, soft lilacs and pearl,
sage green and deep rose; all the colors that
love the language of touch. Even my
black suede suit, touched with an aquamarine pin
like a bow studded with diamonds,
drew your eyes to my throat.

For you, I wrote stories, in which grave events
happened, in rooms overlooking parks, lakes,
and startling nights, lovelier than any reality
we knew. In the morning the lovers would leave,
amid hasty farewells, promises to meet again and
again, and the years in-between sweeter for waiting.

For you, I breathed flowers: roses, floribunda,
old fashioned, even Dr. William Van Fleet,
that rose of my childhood,
buds delicate as nacre
climbing up and over the fence.
The perfume lingered in the air.

For you, my lips were
the finest champagne, bubbles bursting
effortlessly, rising to the top of the flute,
a melody curved to the tongue. The taste
of candied roses.

For you, I gathered all the known sounds
to become poems, plays, lyrical songs,
rhapsodies played in 7/8ths time.
If you touched
me, music filled the air.

For you, who loved the sun and summer
like a child loosed at the beach,
your body smooth, tan as oil,
vibrant as August, the days come
to an abrupt end.

Now, for you, my grief
gathers in corners.

Now, Orphan

Still, standing over that marked plot, while the terrible war
in whichever country you wish to name rages on
and on, while children are left orphans through no design
of their own, routed from their homes like sheep that
have huddled too long, the shearing continues. You have
no clothes that will fit what grief requires. Black is not
a country of origin, only a destination.

The dead litter your life. Orphans of circumstance,
diseases with pronounceable names, you tally the months:
May, June , August, as names are recounted, the holocaust
of death won't stop, it is marching up to your front door, knocking,
only you won't answer that hollow sound.. Not yet. It isn't time,
you announce in a voice steady as your hands. Then you look down,
see these are the hands of your mother, the brown spots connecting
you to her life, as if by drawing lines between them, you could
read her name, which is no longer in the book of life.

Each morning the newspapers continue their body count. The faces
of the dead begin to resemble all the people you have known. Their
jackets are jackets you gave them, and the children have dresses
you bought in some out of the way store that was having a close out sale.
There is no letting up. No letting go. You think of what that poet said,
after the first death there is no other. But he was wrong. There is.

In Heaven There Are No Secrets

Do they all come to greet us
As we cross the line between
Here and here? Old lovers,
Parents, friends, each murmuring,
I always knew and it really doesn't
Matter now. Matter now.
We have gone from our known
Bodies, into this new state
Where we love completely. Here is
So much more to share.
In life we were boundaried:
Husbands, wives, the need
For approval like the fresh
Bend of spring. Nothing was
Ever enough.

Now we are mere joy. All
Present tense. There is no
Need to ask questions.
We already know the answers.
Of course I loved you.
And you. And forever, you.
In that place I gleaned
Only small substantiations.

Now thin as I ever
Dreamed of being, more beautiful
Than flesh would permit, pure
Language soars.
Heaven is where the
Fierce unredemptive joy
Is constantly borne,
Seasonless, uncalendered.

Ascent On The Aiguille Du Midi

"The climb is severe; the rock is magnificent."
Gaston Rebuffat

Comrades of rope, we move in a ballet
of ice, perform a slow dance across the slopes
On a high world of peaks and sliding valleys.
In front of us, the core of our reasoning:
The Southern Needle-- a red mountain
Of granite, dropped from the sky, wedged,
Frozen to its bed of ice. Only now
Standing at the foot, can we see
Her brutal face rising out of the whiteness,
Monstrous, impregnable.

We begin our slow assault, getting
The cautious feel of the rock, finding
A rhythm out of which we can rise.
She resists our bodies, gives nothing
Of herself. We sink our iron into her,
Gouging to stay alive, balancing,
One foot above another. Out hands reach
Higher, towards the fear that is always
above us. She seems to sway in the thin
Air, but it is our own motion, deliberate,
Swaying from side to side, grappling
For footholds. She sends the wind
Down, fills our faces with a mad calling,
And she sings from the long silence
That is this place, from the ice
That is her heart.

I grow giddy, lightheaded. The clouds beneath
Are a second land of white, more solid
Than the sky. On a vertical world, I invent
Gravity; the twin-angled wind finds my body
And changes its elements, becoming air and fire
Thrusting me towards the summit, the consummation.
Hand over hand, the numb extension of rope,

Everything turns red, blood
Turning to granite.
I have given her my blood and my mark
To know her secrets; to stand at the summit,
Free of ropes, upright, at the peak of gravity,
Seeing my own true face,
What I have become,
What I most desire.

^

Biography

Adrianne Marcus has published short stories in Confrontation, Cosmopolitan, Descant, Worlds in our Words, Roanoke Review, as well as Force 10 in Ireland. She has stories scheduled to appear in Pembroke Magazine and The Crescent Review. In poetry, she has published in such places as ArtLife, Poetry Ireland, Cuirt Journal, The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Massachusetts Review, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Red Clay Reader, Motive, Choice, Barnabe Mountain Review, Spark, Mark In Time, Descant, Two Rivers Review,Nimrod, Passager, Thin Air, Solo, etc. She lives in San Rafael, CA with her husband, Ian Wilson; they share the house with a border collie mix, Bonnie Prince Charlie, a wolf-hybrd, Medea, and a thieving Borzoi, Nikki, as well as a terrorist cat, Hecate. Books: Fiction: Carrion House, World of Gifts, St Martin's Press (with William Dickey and Wayne Johnson) 1978 Non-Fiction: Mark & Leibovitz: The Photojournalist, Petersen Press, Book of the Month Alternate selection, Thames & Hudson Press, 1975; The Chocolate Bible, Putnam, 1978 Poetry: The Moon is a Marrying Eye, Red Clay Press, 1968; Faced With Love, Copper Beech Press, 1977; Child of Earthquake Country, New World Press, 1978 Chapbooks: Lying, Cheating and Stealing, Pteradactyl Press, 1985; Journeys, Destinations, Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series, 1997, Magritte's Stones, due out from Lapwing Publications, Belfast, Ireland, 2001.