Three Poems
Samantha Long
All inspired by Tony Smith’s Untitled and Bruce Conner’s Beautiful Collage
(1) Man, That Lady Can Sing
When she was too young and twenty-four, Cynthia sang at a bar, some college scene. She studied the other musicians. One of them, a young man, met her gaze— as he walked up to her, a woman sang softly onstage, My sisters and I cut our hair and still shed like dogs.
“You sounded nice,” the man said. He looked out past her and over her shoulder and nodded his head. Whining and whinnying our words while we still can.
Cynthia turned toward the stage. The woman, she noticed, held her little baby on her hip and leaned it in towards the microphone while she sang as if the baby was singing with her.
“If I wasn’t a baby I’d want a baby,” she said, and the man laughed with her.
He asked how old she was and she answered honestly.
“You’re not a baby,” the man said, but he was kind about it.
“My mama says I am,” Cynthia said, smiling.
His name was Izzy and his brother was the frontman of whatever band. Izzy played the bass and it was all he could play, but he was good. He took Cynthia back to his apartment, and he told her he liked her performance— Oh, baby, your voice sounded like melty butter— while he was inside her, and they both came at that very moment. The sex was good but the birth was hard. Izzy stayed and they moved into Cynthia’s mother’s house. It was a family home in the city and her mother, God love her, only lived there five months out of the year. Izzy didn’t understand it.
Cynthia said, “All the Jew-birds flew south for the winter.”
Her mother’s nose got called a beak once and that’s it, the family became birds. Their big blue house, a nest.
(2) Second Date, Woman Singing
It has taken three speckled horses out the train window
And a blue porcelain pony, a week apart to the day, to
Understand, I’ll tell you this at the bar, that there is no
Person at the other end of my hair, our shared appendage
So long we don’t know there’s another person and that we meet
In the middle. You’ll order another drink. And in between
These animals, fifteen dollars on calla lilies
(I’ve been liking lilies) that could have gone towards the
Blue horse. Man, that lady can sing. And I want to know how
To know if I’ve missed one of God’s profound redirects—
If I’d gone down one street and not another, went
Out that night, stayed in, actually prayed. Temple
Tifereth never taught me how to do anything but
Mourn the dead. Secretly, it’s good you’re a stranger.
I was scared you’d recognize me from some
Something neither of us remember and tell me I’ve gained
Weight and my clothes are different. I have done. They are.
And really, if I’d gotten the little blue horse, I’d have kept it—
Not out of malice but as some ladder out
Of the restaurant and into my body.
(3) Indigo
Glass beads clink and fall. A horse whinnies. A landbird
Calls out for his mother and a seabird squawks
Back. There’s no necklace for this mare. That gull
Is not the turkey’s mother. The
Synagogue is offering a portrait painting class
On Saturday at ten o’clock. They did that last year
Too. I kept it indigo and went with a smile. Dads
Think you want to paint when really you want to sew a shirt
And Joanne said indigo, that’s the only blue tone we’ve
Got left. Indi-gooo get it. She was a cantor, she
Asked what I was painting, where I was sitting, and
The answer is the blue room I was born in and the blue women,
Blue women that are now in it with me. I’m just a Jew
Wandering in the desert, I’m hot like that. My body is soft
And yearning, lost and midnight straight to Joanne’s
Bedside, when we hold hands we share one funny body.
If she’d had a sister she would’ve paid for the shiva. I am
So blue and lucky because I have two baby sisters
Who could pay for my shiva if I needed. If you need
To find them, we have the same hair. Did
I mention that I’m wandering the desert?
Joanne told me as a ghost that in the blue house
There are lovers. Joanne thinks I want to paint
When I just want to be a blue house in the desert.