Jacket 21 - Kevin Gallagher: Two poems

She Made It Home Without Blinking

While
speeding
home on her
bicycle,
the ashes
that crossed
her forehead
lit the way as if they were a light
on a coal miner’s hard hat.
While
she jumped
over potholes
and subway tracks,
her silver
confirmation cross
knocked
on her heart;
wiggling
like a
silver lake
between two mountains.
A bead of sweat
slid across
that lake,
proving water
can be walked on.

Composition in Blue, Noir, et Rouge

Freddy went to New York City to see
the big Piet Mondrian exhibit.

It was his wife’s idea but he loved it.
"There’s no better place I’d rather be!"
he assured her.
      She was worried that he
was wearing a smile but having a fit.

It had been years since she had seen him sit
in front of anything but a TV
for more than fifteen minutes.
      But he sat
in front of the same forty inch painting
for the whole afternoon.
      She thought, "what
in heaven’s name is that man thinking?"

He later remarked that he felt right at
home that day.  "It was like I was watching
a game and the emergency station
identification colors popped on."

Kevin Gallagher is a poet and editor living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in such journals as canwehaveourballback?, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, VeRT and others. He wrote a review of William Corbett’s All Prose in Jacket 16 and is guest-editing a tribute to Kenneth Rexroth in a forthcoming issue of Jacket. From 1992 to 2002 he edited compost, and with Anastasios Kozaitis has founded the new journal, arc. He works as an international environmental economist at Tufts University.