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Vo l . 8 N o . 1
POETRY Christianne Balk Two Poems
Yoke
--for Dorothee Bruand Balk, 1956
Just like Momma held an apple through the gate last week to calm the buckjump filly, Grandma holds the egg balanced on her hand. She taps each end with a nail. I copy her. Warm on my lips, gently nicked, the shell gives up its brown-flecked self, light, viscous, cool on my tongue. I draw it in, savoring the salty-sweet, thick, raw yolk.
Oils 2
Jim Thiele
Daffodils
Good, no? I nod. This is how we took eggs in Chaumont during the war. I nod again, holding the barely broken globe’s now weightless heft carefully. This sustenance, not mine, not hers—a kind of hunger we hold between us close to Momma’s forsythia bush. The filly drank from the trough, pulling against gravity, taking in clear water swirled with mossy leaves.
The woman kneels down, eye to eye with us. She wedges the tip of her trowel in the dirt, pushes us aside, and yanks clumps of hawkweed, wild sheep sorrel, and dog rose from deep winter labyrinths. We collect in small crowds and sway. Her hands dumbfound—she chops soil, jimmies and wrenches tendrils from their beds, upends clinging roots, then casts them on the dry sidewalk. Pale, they wilt. Slowly we turn our heads away from her, rippling. Who might she pluck next? Everything is new—stalk, leaf, vein, blade—all sheathed in green, citron-sharp, edged with sweet black mulch.
Oils
Jim Thiele