issue 35 > poetry > coleman
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What Began as an Ode to a Cabin in the Catskills
by Elizabeth J. Coleman
The stream sounds like my mother
filling our bathtub, porcelain
fat-fingered hot and cold
handles quaint even then.
I’m splayed out on grandmother’s
porch chair, the one from her apartment patio
at 11 Fifth Avenue, where I watched
Nixon’s impeachment hearings forty years ago.
And while we didn’t know
how they’d end, things had a way of ending
better then. I’m scared of mice, bears, nighttime
silence—not like the city
where someone’s always keeping watch,
where I know the sounds, sometimes jarring,
sometimes smooth, where smells of pizza, garbage,
mingle with the sea, where
mornings I enter the flowing crowd. Suddenly
everyone’s in navy, or gaucho pants. I hear
Russian, then a language I can’t place.
There’s comfort in surprise, in
the intimacy of rudeness.
But this loud blue sky and green of maple
match perfectly, as do pink dianthus and orange hawkweed,
combinations I wouldn’t dream
of wearing in New York where translucent models
breeze by me on Broadway,
with such confidence and shining hair.