Elizabeth Volpe

In Highgate Cemetery

 

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

                                                Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris

 

Imagine lifting her hair, gobs

of it, hair which never stopped

growing, though she’d been dead

for years when Rossetti decided

he wanted the poems back, that

it had been impulse to fling them

into the coffin. At home reading

by his fireside, or sketching,

on the October evening when

his friends pry open the lid, hinges

rusty, earthsalt having seasoned

the metal. They find her hair

spreading in auburn fury, the poems

on her breast under crossed

hands. Some bit of face still

there above the green brocade

dress, so like the one she wore as

Ophelia, dead then too all those hours

in the water while Millais studied

her death. How to float there,

how to conjure non-life, barely

breathing, eyes half-closed, hair

swirling, muddied weeds colliding

with her fingers: nettles, poppies,

forget-me-nots. In the brittle air

of the churchyard, shadows pave

a flat path as the men look

down, something disintegrating

on their moonlit faces.

 

 

 

 

Risking This Life

 

 

Refusing to be hijacked

 

by the scratch of squirrels in the attic—

 

how I would like to wring their little red necks

 

or maybe join their coven for awhile, scrittering

 

along rafters, then tunneling out to the rooftop

 

to watch the wind raise a dervish of leaves—I go on

 

writing. I plant my eyes on the page, but I can hear

 

a hum from the highway, which gets me thinking

 

about the man I saw yesterday driving with a thick book

 

propped open on the steering wheel, his eyes

 

locked on the page each time I passed. I wanted to honk

 

or alert the police, but more than that

 

I wanted to be in his rusty Impala reading

 

over his shoulder, risking this life with him

 

for words.

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Volpe is the author of Brewing in Eden, winner of the 2007 Robert Watson Poetry Award from Greensboro Review/Spring Garden Press. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard, River Styx, storySouth, Rattle, roger, Cave Wall, Siren, and The MacGuffin, and can be heard on the audio site From the Fishouse. She won The Briarcliff Review 2004 Poetry Contest, the 2006 Metro Detroit Writers Contest, the 2008 Juniper Prize from Alligator Juniper and was nominated for Best New Poets 2008.