Three Poems

 

by Sheila Squillante

 

 

 

 

Music Often Consoled and Will Console

 

 

See how recapitulation climbs to the top

and looks right in?

Look, here’s the whole list by year:

music often consoled and will console

blue suit jacket

teeth on neck, fine ribs

the turnaround

warded off—

 

Then, in the course of the winter, worry kept her

from relating to him in a normal way.

 

Among other things, she said

slow strolls on kitchen counter, surreptitious pissing

in the laundry; pornography retreats to a modern cliché

all thanks to people like you.

 

 

 

 

Then in the Course of Winter They Agreed

 

 

Then in the course of winter, they agreed

to the indifferent element, its penetrating,

mediocre Sundays.

 

The list could go on, of course, but

instead they start sentences that will languish

between tension and fruition.

 

In addition to the matchless, paradisiacal scenery—

the smell of suede, the smooth texture of silk, the rustle

of tissue paper— life points to deception,

vanishes in the morning air.

 

 

 

 

The Matchless Paradisiacal Scenery

 

 

Most lucid moments are modern clichés: old Rome

with its eyes full of rain, the marvelous shock of

“Are you really going to move back home?”

 

Reaching the turnaround, teeth on neck,

music often consoled and will console

the whole year: slow strolls

on kitchen counters, surreptitious pissing

in the laundry, metal and other magnets,

 

a worry that kept her

from relating to him in a normal way.

 

It’s ideal. Reason in its quest finds only Reason itself.

Some folks would say this wasn’t ritualized but

each time the brain retreats to a quiet place, stops play, files home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sheila Squillante is the author of the poetry chapbooks A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) and Another Beginning (forthcoming from Kattywompus Press, 2012).  Her poems have appeared is such places as PANK, TYPO, 42Opus, Phoebe, MiPOesias and No Tell Motel.  She teaches writing at Penn State.