The Second Blush: Poems - Hardcover

Peacock, Molly

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393066517 ISBN 13: 9780393066517

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

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Acclaimed poet Molly Peacock tracks the vicissitudes of midlife marriage in her saucy, vulnerable, philosophical sixth collection.

Demonstrating once again her "luxuriantly sensual imagination" (Washington Post), Molly Peacock celebrates marriage and a two-track life with the man who became her husband. As teenage sweethearts separated by other obligations, they found each other again at midlife. The piquant, sonnet-based poems take as their starting point her husband's survival from a life-threatening disease, addressing the contradictory ideas of planning for the future along with the urgency to make the present brilliantly alive. Three sections of the book portray moments in the marriage―domestic glimpses―but all the poems revolve around the deeper issue of how we love and how love affects the way we live.

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About the Author:

As president of the Poetry Society of America, Molly Peacock was one of the creators of New York’s Poetry in Motion program, and she is the series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She is based in New York and Toronto.

Of Night
A city mouse darts from the paws of night.
A body drops from the jaws of night.
A woman denies the laws of night,
awake and trapped in the was of night.
A young man turns in the gauze of night,
unraveling the cause of night:
that days extend their claws at night
to re-enact old wars at night,
though dreams can heal old sores at night
and Spring begins its thaw at night,
while worry bones are gnawed at night.
He sips her through a straw at night.
Verbs whisper in the clause of night.
A finger to her lips
the pause of night.

Marriage
I watch my husband at a party,
a shy boy become a man at ease at last.
Success freshens his face, the boy now free
to pass beneath his expressions
as if slipping under a fence.
I used to slip under a fence
to swim in a stream-fed pond
and laze in the water till shocked
and delighted by a cold spot I swam through.
That's what his face is like,
infused by a source inside him.
I know I have a part in it,
just as I was part of the pond
where I loved to swim.

The Flaw
The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turning blue field into sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.

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