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 Return to Alan Shapiro: An Aesthetics of Inadequacy More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Joy
What never comes when called.by Alan Shapiro ..... What hides when held. Guest most at home where least expected. Vagrant balm of Gilead. What, soon as here, becomes the body's native ground and, soon as not, its banishment. Coming and going, indifferent, magisterial. My lovely daughter— walking me to the car to say goodbye the day I left to keep watch at my brother's bedside— suddenly singing "I feel pretty, oh so pretty" as she raised her arms up in a loose oval over her head and pirouetted all along the walk. Savage and magisterial— the joy of it, the animal candor of each arabesque, each leaping turn and counterturn, her voice now wobbly with laughter, "And I pity any girl who isn't me tonight." Savagely beautiful, not so much like the lion that the camera freezes in mid- pounce, claws outstretched for the stumbling antelope, as like the herd escaping that the camera pans to, zig- zagging, swerving as one, their leaping strides now leaping higher, faster, even after, it seems, the fear subsides— after the fear and the relief they keep on running for nothing but the joy of running, though it could be any one of them is running from its fallen mother or father, sister or brother, across the wide savanna, under a bright sun into fresher grass.
Copyright © 2002 by Alan Shapiro. All rights reserved. Song and Dance by Alan Shapiro; Houghton Mifflin, P. 28. |
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