Egg

How odd that only in the rich
middle, the golden core, do I taste
as if from inside an egg,
so perfectly contained,
pure and untested,
what those young, thin-shelled, dejected
boyfriends must have felt,
willing to go so far, to show
so much not of feeling but
something less lovely - raw want -
that for it they expected to open my prize.
One crack risked admitting a secret
that terrified them:
In those days nice girls made
pain, not love, knowing
not one primal cry for years
or why those gonads ached.
And now, bedded to competence,
One sees young men
whose wishes one would love
to escort to the abyss
and jump in with them.
But safe, vaulted, I dwell well insured
from today, inside a different egg,
intact again and to the young
quite invisible.

Knot

You can call it a raft
While it stays afloat,
I suppose. Now our wide
Queen-size mattress keeps something up
Or someone, maybe us.
So I'll lie on my back
And travel the way Ulysses did,
They say, casting out stories
To save his life.
Or I'll throw a rope
To the other breather in this
Night-moored craft.

Waves, like us, lose their
Head in a good storm.
On a bad night sirens dive
Or moon-and star-ghosts distract
Floating sleepers from the
Risk and the thrill of blind steering.
Here with no choice
I rely on the dream of rope
And pray it will save and test us,
The way a good knot does.

I've tried for years
And it's too many words to describe
The knot
That keeps us fast.
No way to tell if it needs slack,
Only keep in mind
That it's not a leash, not a noose or a slip,
As my watch grows short.

In those windows, black
Now with night, I've
Seen ropes of rain
Until winter, the warden,
Hardens them to bars
That don't melt for months.
I try to get a lasso through,
Moviewise, jailed cowboy style, to get help,
To get you past this pallet, this Medusa's raft.
But my words can't make
Of a mess a success, the
Way a knot works, mocking
Subtle tugs at its mysteries.
For tonight the tangle that binds these
Drifters still waits
As it holds their own,
Or it's time to pray the waking world
To send us some Alexander
Swimming in with his one bold stroke.

^

Biography

Nancy Nahra, who comes from New England, publishes poems in literary journals in the U.S. and the U.K. She is Professor of Humanities at Champlain College in Vermont, where she lives in winter, and Visiting Professor of Humanities at John Cabot University in Rome, where she lives in summer.