Two Poems by Esther Sadoff
/Cornfields
The corn stalks are not yet razed.
Like abandoned flags they tatter
their leaves, sheaves of emerald
green now brown as cattails.
I can't forgive their dying
though I yearned for them.
Let the harvester bend them
low with a sharp blade,
dust the air thick
with a motorized haze.
Let goldenrod and aster
wreathe the forgotten field.
Let prim blue houses reign
over perpetual night,
electric lines tower for miles
with their tooth-pick frames,
a ribbon-lane switchbacking
through clipped green lawns,
toward the certainty of home.
Some days are sea-deep
I weave the bike's wheel between
white stripes in the road, interstices
like chapters in a book, zigzagging
precise as a knife, light sharpening everything.
When you were younger, you nosed
your bike, skidded against your brother's
wheel, maneuvering it like a razor,
the whiz of faded rubber brushed
with the dust of a thousand stones.
You went barefoot through potholes
and puddles, feet chalked white,
knowing only to worship the sun.
Other people's childhoods are easy to envision,
though I can still feel the soft grip
of the handlebars, the riotous tuft
of tinsel streamers, the heat of a hand
against my back as I wobbled,
the street gray-stippled like television static.
Whoever invented days was lying.
One day breaths into the next,
the spade-shape of a bird's tail
like a bandeau darkening my eyes,
the splay of the starling’s wings
almost dipping into water,
flitting still across the shadowy bank,
a hand warm against my back,
always propelling me forward,
alternating between hot and cold,
light and dark, yesterday and the next.
Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Wingless Dreamer, Free State Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, and many other publications.
