Poems

Architectural Detail
National Building Museum, Washington, DC

In several hundred darkened Roman arches
there is only one with a living,
breathing tympanum.
A painter,
with 10-foot-high aluminum ladder,
stands at the springline.

The arch’s span and rise
frame him in a way that, perhaps,
he is not normally in life.
His back fully arched—
columnar vertebrae give way
to graceful line of arm and tool.

The annals say: Michelangelo grew a goiter
in just this way, dwelling in the den of the papal
apartments, beard turned up to heaven…nape fallen in.

Now he rolls an egg-shell layer along the soffit,
oblivious to the possibility
his muscles convey,
light on shade, and
the sureness in his stroke.
See how much he loves the curve.

From below, seventy-two Doric columns,
seventy-two Ionic columns, and eight of
the world’s largest Corinthian columns
attempt to tremble with desire. Ill hath he
chosen his part, lamented that artist to popes
and kings, who seeks to please the worthless world.

For often must he wear the look of ease
when grief is in his heart.

–Rose Marie Berger

The phrases in italics in “Architectural Detail” are excerpts from the journals of Michelangelo. This poem was published in Beltway Poetry Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.

***

The Women of Juarez Take a Message to the Bishop

The narcotraficante commanded me
in gestures, take off your blouse.
Then he jerked it, scattering buttons—
smooth and pink—along the ground.

I wanted to undress with more
dignity; a delicate slowness
that might alter time,
might turn back his hands.

From a place beyond the Christmas
lights, he yelled—“Whore.”
And mimed a woman kneeling,
hands lifted to her face.

He must have knelt too
because I felt the muzzle
find the soft swale of my temple,
a part I notice only when exhausted.

A little ways off,
above the desert brush
and trash, beyond the factory fence,
aware of the zipper and what he used

to subdue me, I watched a blue light
rising and falling, falling
and rising. To me
it looked like Tepeyac
and the dawn.

And, against his shadowy line, She swaddled
me in a protective veil, wrapping me in roses.

—Rose Marie Berger

This poem appeared in Sojourners (July 2007) and in the South African feminist journal Agenda (November 2007, issue #74). For more information on women in Juárez, Mexico, see www.mujeresdejuarez.org.

**

Some Songs Required
Psalm 137

Down the river from Babylon
there was a city of Dales,

not quite like Zion. In Nutdale,
Elmdale, and Oakdale people sat

two by two in boxes neatly stacked
where they wept without knowing why.

Upriver, Babylon heard only their singing
in a special language of clicks and snaps;

not in the stringed language of the lyre,
that riffled and flowed over the feet
of the Stored Ones. True too that the Dale-dwellers
babbled in a tongue fewer and fewer of them

could understand. Instead they stared:
at each other, at the river, pointing out the little

heads of children, afloat like golden boats
on the current. While Babylon, teeth sharp

from gnawing on its platinum
bedpost at night, reached down its

right hand to touch the flag hanging
limp between its legs. A single gold tear

slipped away to tell the others.

—Rose Marie Berger