For Lois Langland Emerita
Intimates of a shared youth,
Dryads of eucalyptus and olive groves,
This time gather wiser:
Minervas wearing our mothers’ grey locks
On still-smooth brows:
Architects and sculptors and teachers,
Painters and poets and swimmers,
Mothers and lovers and runners,
Golfers and actors, pioneers and tender sisters.
Among us she takes her place,
Taking us in with her keen gaze:
Surely assessing the weight of each soul.
Thoroughly herself,
Striding her straight iambic habit
Of Yes No Yes No Yes unlike anyone’s,
She makes her spare speech of nouns and verbs,
Her voice the stronghold of her individuality:
Apart, yet a part of this female circle.
In beautiful robes
She reads rhymed lines aloud
Hers or her brothers' or sisters’,
Cherishing their fashion,
Rolling the rhyming bones
Deep in her out-stretched throat.
Her hair shines down straight,
A silver curtain that neither reveals
Nor conceals the oracle.
In earnest discourse she tests each idea
Against the steel blade of care and respect
For truth, freedom, humanity.
She counsels us to earn enemies with wisdom,
And to cultivate friends with joy,
Perfectly careful of the integrity of each.
Her daughters’ dreams and ceremonies
Draw us concentrically closer,
Past elephant-toe curbs, columns cum scholars,
Polar bears and filled female plates
And dramatic pentameter.
Asanas turn the eyes inside,
And plastered walls splattered
With patterns of shade and purple olives
Contain a colloquy,
Stories told through a moon-dusted evening
Among the armed radians of blue agave.
In this dry garden of corroded limestone,
We speak with tears of its ponds of love;
And with love of those who shape and tend it
Through decades of now and forever.
Hungry, who come with flowers
Take the rose’s rough nourishment.
Thorny fists of prickly pear
Punch pink out of the cactus,
Hard blooms, fierce freed nipples.
Morning leads each separately
To step from stone to stone
In her backyard of thistles,
Grey-green weeds thirsting in dew.
Dragonflies alight, fans of stiffened wing.
The place reunites the women
While making each her own.
Never lost, but found:
That hoarse, brilliantly clear
“Hally Boy! Come Home!”
Echoing through those years
Like the voices of fading murals,
The insistence of self.
Claremont, Solstice/Camp ‘95