Vincent understood them: the way they yield
their darkling faces
to the sun,
aflame for its arcing shimmer dance
across the day’s mysterious
expanse,
how big they are, how weighty, over grown,
the way they lean together
in the fields,
conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan
as their heads
reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.
He gathered them in vases, painted their petaled fall from grace,
bunched
together, shy, askew and awkward, out of place,
caught their surprise
at being indoors, the droop and shrug of leaves,
the way they suddenly
dropped, losing all of their color.
Too painful to paint them riotous
at the roadside in full bloom:
signs of what we were before the
crows moved in to feed.
Eileen Moeller has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including Feminist Studies, Paterson Literary Review, Caprice, Blue Fifth Review, and Philadelphia Stories, and in anthologies, e.g. Paterson: A Poet?s City, Writing Women, Cries of the Spirit : A Celebration of Women?s Spirituality, Claiming the Spirit Within : A Sourcebook of Women?s Poetry ( Beacon Press) and The Nerve: Writing Women of 1998 (Virago). A website manuscript:
Body in Transit, appears at skinnycatdesign.co.uk/eileen/