Sample Poems by Robin Chapman
Let’s Imagine Each Room Is an Entire World
This one, for example,
The anonymous drapes and spreads,
Dust-streaked windows
Overlooking the heating vents—
Each of us amazed
To find it holds the other;
Haven’t we slow-danced
To the big bands of the ’thirties
As the city sirens
Cried the blocks?
In childhood it was enough
To throw a blanket
Over the cardtable
And pull the flap
Slowly aside to enter
On hands and knees
Another kingdom,
While outside
The wind howled, rain beat,
Or the sun shone, pitiless
On the endless sand dunes—
And we alone, in those
Vast rooms, arranged
Our imaginary friends.
The Woman Shutting Down
This is the woman shutting down
She has moved into
A single room
Where she sleeps
And sleeps
When she touches herself
She cannot remember desire
Nor when the rolls of soft flesh arrived
That loosely hold her now
The light is a perfectly even light
In the evening sky
But this does not console her
Nor do the birds who arrive, shivering
On the branches outside her window
She puts out seed indifferently
Does not remember
How intently once she watched
The small leaves opening
In opposing pairs on the dogwood tree
Words ringing through her
And onto the paper
Out in the early spring world she walks
Seeing only the paper white as snow
Turning at night
To words of winter wind and cold
As though only what freezes
Could please her now
As though she might stop
The turning season, time itself
To stay in that dark antechamber
Where music might rise
From the lost underworld
Valentines
In first grade, punching out
The cartoon speakers ballooning “Be mine,”
Laboriously copying names on the backs,
I learned who belonged to my class,
Not to leave anyone out,
And the terror and power of words—
Whether to sign this one “from” or “love”;
By fifth, the list mastered,
I concentrated on
The handmade art of the singled-out heart,
Folding the red construction paper in two
And cutting out half of the imagined whole
For a boy I was too shy to speak to,
Worrying over whether I should send
The one that was too skinny or too fat;
And so it went, over the years,
The ones I sent, the ones I read,
The ones signed “from” or “love,”
The ones that didn’t come, the ones
I didn’t send, the too-fat, too-skinny
Lopsided ones, the ones I bought myself,
While the real heart in the body beat steadily,
Keeping its faithful pace awake or asleep,
From first breath to last; unfolding
The morning paper last week to the hungry face
Of the Sudanese mother carrying the bones
Of her starving son on her shoulders,
Heart the only muscle he had left—
No words for the courage and power in her face,
Or the terror of the world,
Though I am frantically cutting out hearts
For every one of us,
All of them signed “love.”