Two Poems

George Oppen

The pamphlet being splayed apart
to its staples—two bits
of aluminum holding together
quite a lot, actually.
My claw, dry as an eagle’s.
If I wasn’t afraid, and I’m not
afraid of much,
I’d get a sailboat and learn to maintain it,
keep the sea life off. Also a wife
about whom I might say, The moon
rose like a rising moon.



The Year’s Notable Deaths

The newspaper released its list
of notable deaths: three saxophonists,
Paul Auster, the inventor
of the poodle skirt. I’m afraid
my mother won’t make it
into next year’s edition. She isn’t
an irreverent memoirist
or the host of an NPR show;
she didn’t help invent the Pop-Tart
or quarterback for the Eagles.
She likes pickleball and boiled eggs,
and she’s seen everything
by Yasujirō Ozu. (I fell asleep
during Tokyo Story.)
Do I wish she were a star
of the show-jumping circuit
or an Oscar-nominated actress,
America’s best-known sex columnist
or fitness instructor? Yet,
out to lunch with her she turns
into a Jewish comedian,
then a mentalist, the parent kind.
Technically, she is an award-winner,
though the prize was a trophy
made of cheap plastic,
or maybe it was a paper plate. I forget
the names of Richard Serra’s works,
that Medicis and Rothschilds
still make headlines. But which
tabloid writes about falling ill
three years post-retirement, weeding
a yard in Florida or reading
Barbara Pym in a green armchair?

____
Erick Verran lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of Obiter Dicta (2021, Punctum Books) and has work published in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.