At the Home

Dora dances with tottering ease

Beside the spinet my father plays.

Old songs beat like nickels on the keys.


She spins, he pedals, his fingers seize

Self-taught octaves, skim on moonlit bays.

Dora dances with tottering ease,


Hands on her hips. A remembered breeze

Rocks in time the woody trunk she sways.

Old songs beat like nickels on the keys. . .


. . .raisins-almonds. . .a Jolson reprise. . .

From damask wing-chairs, white heads nod each phrase.

Dora dances with tottering ease


At twilight, held in parentheses

Of drapes half-drawn on the window bays.

Old songs beat like nickels on the keys. . .


A gauze man floats the flying trapeze. . .

Kitchen-help quietly stack the trays.

Dora dances with tottering ease.

Old songs beat like nickels on the keys.


[In A Disc of Clear Water, Saturday Press, 1981; first appeared in Iowa Review]



A Marriage in Deja Vu

The saw begins:

vibrating sense of a time


we were born

as twins, one bone fused.


In this life, we connected

at sixteen, formed


an autonomy. We do

not separate. My breastbone


aches as signal

of that ghost bridge


where your needs cross to me

at will, a doubled pain:


my scar’s healed knot

and the friction


of your twists toward me

and away. Don’t you notice


how fast I move to accommodate

you? I’m afraid a seam


might tear and the scaffold

of two hundred fretted bones


collapse unwired. I stay alert to twinges

in my chest, bend


to the span.

You think me happy: therefore, I am.


[In A Disc of Clear Water, Saturday Press, 1981]

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© Copyright, 2014, Charlotte Mandel.
All Rights Reserved.