Patricia Fargnoli
I don't consciously try to address women's issues or feminist issues in my work; it simply happens because I write out of my own world vision and my experience in the world.....and that, necessarily is colored by the fact that I live in a woman's body.
Europa’s Love Song
Now that I have the sound of your voice in my ears
I will go out in the meadow to meet you where the flowers
leap into my willow basket.
Now that I have the sound of your voice, your smooth
bellow, you will take me rampaging over the sea,
your bull-back broad as a bed.
Now that I have the brilliance of waves and the sound of sun
in my ears, we will escape into another land that will be mine,
that no one can steal from me.
Now that I have nothing but the spear, bronze bodyguard
and the hound, his low growl at the door, his ready teeth,
no stranger can harm me.
Now that I hear your bronze voice in my ears,
I am bodyguard to the meadow of my body, my bed
is brilliance, the hound bellows at the door.
Now the sound of the spear silences itself in the broad fields
and the hound lies under the willow
and the quiet land will be mine,
I will carry the sound of your voice in my ears.
Cancer Dream
After the dream where I was lying on the floor
of a storeroom with a long tube in the side of my breast
and water sluicing over it to kill pain
while the nurses finished off the oreos,
I woke and made coffee, trying to get back
into this world, or more exactly,
to leave the other--where my daughter
had been telling a long story to the doctor
so that no one listened to mine about my friend,
who had just died with grace,
surrounded by a legion of people she loved.
Then I took my dog out back into the emerging
umbrellas of the trees that have been here
for a century, and now I am sitting in pajamas
at my desk, running my fingertips over the whole hills
of my breasts which are white and silken as risen loaves.
Love Song to My Imperfect Body
Big woman, gallant moon, gunny sack of mind and soul,
chemistry tempered by our desire to be something
beyond it and immortal; you who tote your dose
of ache and sentiment between the antique beach houses,
do you still desire another?
Love wages her battle between the lighted islands,
where fishermen wrench their daily meal
from seas that turn suddenly violent.
When I consider you, I consider the aroma
of marsh grass, lode of light sweeping across the curved shore.
The taste of you is transformative and delicious.
Kisses and kisses. I return to you, your infinite passion,
your magic, your sadness, your little cottages of quiet.
Let us sleep as if wrapping our arms around each other.
Patricia Fargnoli's latest book is Then, Something, Tupelo Press 2009. In addition she's published 3 other books (two of them prize-winning) and two chapbooks. Most recently her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Nimrod, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International and Valparaison Review. She was the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 12/06-3/09 and has been a Macdowell Fellow.