Two Poems: Stacy Gnall
What She Was Wearing
This morning, the moon’s insistence. Its light refuses to call off the search for the girl from back three decades from three exits away when I was a girl, too. National news.
And all the mothers spinning cautionary tales till they were blue.
Always a bad sign, her purse left behind. And did the shoe the hounds found nearby match?
She was wearing a crease in her slack. A necklace of several strands. Youth in its shammy trance.
She was wearing her wherewithal. A path through the pastoral. Some cheap tin faith at her chest.
She wore blue, but she wore it novel. Clever like a phrase from Twain. She wore this old thing? She wore mandarin
spritzed from morning. Now she wears an asterisk beside her name.
I wear relief because I have no daughter to teach: I was wearing my childhood open as a cloak, closed as a cloche, when I learned to wear her scare each time I walk down the street. When I learned these clothes will outlast our bones.
Each morning, the flowers open
without our knowing. Each morning, the moon is a mother, too,
who only looked away for a moment.
Tapestry of Boy with Horse in Quicksand
Like the boy, I have begged in that swamp. Pleaded, pulling reins in a sand where sadness sinks you. I have loved a bright, white speechless thing more than anything. I’ve been the horse gone down without fighting, too. Once, like the boy, I thought the animal unable to feel. Drowning in the quick, still, but for my frantic stallion eye— When will I for the last be as mistaken as that boy? I am the stitch needing always set right. I am the steed searching always for where I last had joy.