Three Poems
by Kristin Camitta Zimet
MRS. CHARLES CHAPLIN
Portrait by George Romney, 1781, Oil on canvas
I’m not Mrs. Charles. She’s a mockup, satin doll
tailored tight at bosom and bustle. She can’t
breathe, except in measured stanzas, stilted iambs.
Mincing brush strokes. Mannered flourishes.
Never a dropped hairpin, a pulled stitch, a stray
ribbon. If her cheek is flushed, it is with rouge;
if her mind spreads, it’s stiff as a fan. But look
past her lap. Over in the sky I sail, blown loose,
hoydenish and stormy. Glorious. She thins
her lips in a hard smile and keeps on looking
anywhere but there. Which is a fine distraction.
I see you’re not fooled. Help me: don’t tell.
PAINTING “THE BRIDGE”
I didn’t know I had to break the moon.
It stood before the bridge, a bright blot,
the way an angel can’t forsake the foreground.
The way fear swims a nerve.
The moon would not lie down.
Paint puddled there, like milk hit from my hands.
It clung like the slick my father left
in my pajama bottoms, in the bed
that would not swallow me.
It thickened like the glare
the priest poured on my head
for asking the bad questions
while the light, the light fell on me,
marking me, not an annunciation
but a sign of quarantine.
I pushed the brush, I used up all the white,
but back behind the moon, up in the gap
between the mother and the father piers
the cables crossed like bitten lips,
like one leg locking down
the other leg, and falling lines
chopped my horizon and my children’s up–
I didn’t know.
I had to.
Break.
myface
slides between slats
of a steel playpen. Lift
me lift
me out:
Mommy/I thirsty
kneewon’t. touchdon’t
allgone
rockabye, the sky
is plowed with light.
VERSIONS OF A PAINTING
1.
The Baby is invisible. This is not
about the Baby. Slapped upside-down
six months ago, flattened beneath
a quilt, halved by the frame’s bottom,
image slid away like a magician’s
card. She is the mother’s mirror,
under-queen of hearts. Patched-up,
her alphabet bisects at O. She is
bottle-fed at blocked-out hours.
2.
On the primed canvas floats the first
mother-face. Over quilted squares,
Z to O, it hovers, an illusion,
hair trapped into waves, lips slicked
cadmium red. Pearls noose the neck
in tight circles, under-grins below
a change-purse pout. Spiked heels
keep the feet from touching down.
A high blue frock closes the body.
3.
The next mother has a screwed-up
mouth, scarf crammed in sleeve.
The eyes shift left for a way out
but the wall has no openings, only
tacked-up futures: zero, a tangle
of cut nerves. Bodice stripped,
breasts minus nipples, her arms
half curve over the baby, almost
clamped for a carnival ride.
4.
The third face the mother gets
is round against the nursery’s
corners and angles. Her breasts
pop up but her torso tenses,
made to vanish under a long
layered spell she tries to unsay.
Mommy, she calls, Mommy.
The painter’s face dawns overhead.
From her brush, paint jets like milk.
Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of a collection of poems, Take in My Arms the Dark. She was the longtime editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley, where she is a poet, artist, nature interpreter, and healer. A devoted member of the Virginia Master Naturalists and the Virginia Native Plant Society, she has been creating a Wildflower of the Week series, and interpretation for the Sensory Explorers’ Trail at Sky Meadows State Park.
COLD SIGNAL 