Wishes and Needs
Sometimes,
I’m born in Boston.
I
come of age in decrepit mansions,
bricked
and blue-veined. A Japanese
garden
circles a sculptured pool.
Inspired
by my mother, professor
Of
Eastern art, I attend Madame de Trop’s
school
for girls. At eighteen, trickles
of
Latin and Greek and Renaissance painting
flow
from my brain, down the refined sinus
track
into my classic nose and out of my
seasoned
mouth. By twenty-one, I choose
for
proper reasons either to research allergies
or
to conduct the Paris Pops. Svelte,
each
day I romp with African animals, swim
with
Amazon fish from Brazil.
Symmetric Again
Nightmares
for days.
My
niece in pieces in a mudpuddle;
I
am arrested: “Unclean!”
No
member of my family is whole. All
severed,
irregular.
Walking
willfully, he comes to me
from
all sides in a dream. Robed
in
fire, filling my white caladiumed
garden,
he says, “You are Jacob.
You
loathe Esau. I will make you
symmetric
again.” As I flee, he
pursues
me, saying,
“I
am what
I am.
I am a rag man,
the second coming,
your dark self—renamed,
returned.”
Sybil Pittman Estess, Ph.D., was one of eight finalists for Poet Laureate
of the State of Texas in 2009. She is
the author of her new fourth poetry release: Maneuvers, 2010, by Inleaf Press. Estess has taught at the University of Houston, the
University of St. Thomas, Rice University, Houston Community College, and Blinn
Colleges. She has served as a literature panelist for both the Texas Commission on
the Arts and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston as well as on the Adult
Education Council of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral. Sybil Pittman Estess
was a founding organizer of the Houston Poetry Fest. Estess, along with Laura’s Poetry Group members Vivian Macias, Kelly
Patton, and Sally Ridgway, gave a reading at our FPL Poetry Series in September of 2011.
More poems by Sybil Pittman Estess:
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