by Jeff Kaliss -
She lies down,
downhill from the clapboard house, and the barn,
far from her bed,
and she rises to rest
down left on Wyeth’s canvas.
There she stretches
along all our memories
where she may stay,
if only she can,
long past the sea-cooled day’s dusk
outside the town of Thomaston,
and long after,
after she’s gone to ground
in the town cemetery,
and the artist has been lain
beneath a worded stone,
way down along the rolling hills
of Pennsylvania.
For now, with us,
she feels with the brief, short life
of a Maine meadow,
in all its amber multitude,
her eyes, away from ours,
watching the waves of simple splendour,
no place for longing there.
It’s we who want her wanting.
Jeff Kaliss is a longtime music journalist and author, brought up in Bar Harbor on the Atlantic Coast of the State of Maine. After the publication of his I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone ( 2008, 2009), he completed an MFA degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, in his adopted hometown, where he and his wife Louise Whitlock raised two children. Jeff’s poetry has been published in college journals and in general reader periodicals, and he’s a frequent reader at Lime Square Poets and at numerous open mics online and in person, where he has been regularly featured.