Likely

Lisa Coffman

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780873385558
• eBook ISBN: 9781612771267
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Lisa Coffman is a major poet in the making. Imagine a voice that combines hear-of-American brooding like James Wright's with a shaded elegance like Elizabeth Bishop's. Imagine Whitman's spirit somewhere in the vicinity. Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks' dialogue, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprises and beauty; some of the poems—'Rapture,' 'The Products of Hog,' 'The Graveyard'—left me breathless."—Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Judge

I

LIKELY

Magnolia bloom can sex the air

until one thinks for long blanknesses

only magnolia, magnolia.

The tree shakes with the climbing of two girls.

The taller, stretched among four branches

looks up, carrying a knife.

The other settles at a lesser place

and thinks of falling. Magnolia

withers if touched. The petals

spot where the fingers were, then darken,

spoiling the smell. A girl raised

to be her daddy’s boy knows to reach,

slowing and slowing the hand until

it wavers with the flower.

She cuts the slight wood at the stem,

tips to her a color of things hidden—

skin at the lifted clothes, or the shining

averted face of a woman undressing.

The younger girl will run alongside with the news.

The flower floats all night in a glass,

the kitchen lit in other places by the moon.

GIRL/SPIT

She presses her dark lips

in a pleased way, as if she has said

the word whiskey again, or tucked

into a corner of her mouth a grass blade

which she briefly squatted and chose

before standing, and with a slap

to her back pockets, slouched

into the length of herself.

It’s the hook-thinness of her smile

that draws something like the beaded

metallic chain of a lamp

down my spine and stomach, toward the pucker

her smile has pushed to its corner—

the flutter of that cheek

working down on itself, working spit,

and finding its own taste sweet.

MEMLING’S VIRGIN

For love of her, he exaggerated.

And for love of her, forgot that he did.

And for love, permitted himself to attend her,

to smooth her brow and fan the hair spilling on the rich pale robe

toward her long hands that always lay restfully.

And for her pleasure selected

the headband beaded with five-pearl flowers,

brocading across the chest shallow as a girl’s,

a gold trinket box, the Holy Book, an apple small as a plum.

And for love of her had her look at none of it.

And put no one near her but the child

who would say, as she knew, Woman what have I to do with thee?

Working before her daily

he shaped the eyes that were turned down, the narrow upper lip

she sealed in her composure on the lower full one,

and when he could do no more—

as the executioner lifted the elegant jointed spear—

he turned her away

and drew the shawl over her head.

And, perhaps against his own desire, disclosed

the profile hardened in the constriction of grief—

then gave the tears a milky light, like pearls.

CHEERLEADERS

Out of the American provinces

regarded by many as exile

one is born into—

evolves the oddity of a girl

to whom her own opinions pose a danger

yet able to shout, pinioned

in the execution of a complex-figured leap

before any number of audience, local, or from nearby towns.

Admitting “their attitude is like that of strippers,”

admit a scrubbed citric innocence to the sex.

No Venus grins here from the foam, curl ends tweaked water-dark:

the hair fanned across the inwardly groaning boy’s fourth-period desk

has been ironed flat or flipped up,

the hairless lotioned calves end in sock folds,

the chest is topped demurely with a carpet letter.

As for the bruited away-bus escapades of sex:

these are more often exaggerations

in the nature of all town troubadours.

The intent is, rather, “to be kissproof:

put on lipstick, then have someone

powder your lips through a piece of tissue. Do

not inhale.” Not admired by majestic-thighed women

passing in and out of steamroom steam

are the somnolent voices roused to staccato, single drawn word starting

low ending loud, childish bell still to go OH go OH

as the lead girl takes her hands from her hips

among all eight waiting in identical postures

and puts the bunny-ear shape of her sneaker to an in-place prancing

or strikes the wooden court boards hard

until the stands start ringing back.

Even admitting the ingenuity of their pleats

that allow the skirt to extend straight from the waist,

and the athletic rigor required for certain jumps,

no one accuses cheerleaders of usefulness:

they are discarded at the end of high schools

excluded from cabinet meetings and businesses,

yet, while it is known

“there are no women like that, anywhere!”

as the young photographer cried, home

from retouching hair and blemishes

on women already exemplary for beauty,

his girlfriend and sisters in the magazine-

littered living room

merely looked at him, then went on with their reading.

WEATHER

When I sit teaching among my red-lipped girls sugaring to ripeness

among the flushed necks prideful as mine has been

and feel in myself only the new wish

to lie down in the earliest dark and turn my face

or when I go among pleasured women filling with first child, oh

when I want to go over what is gone and done

then I come to my high room that faces the river

and the wide light the river moves ceaselessly under.

THE SMALL TOWN

Are not two sparr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Notes