Barbara Van Noord

 

Lieder

 

No. 1

My man sits on the sofa

listening to Schubert.

I've had hunks and torsos

in my time, with lots of hair,

the kind who really do gleam

but eventually to run to fat.

He is not that.

My hero, I say. He cooks for me

and folds the laundry.

I am a front-stoop dreamer

reading the Sanskrit of birdsong

and the runes of leaves

against a blue sky.

 

Because I love ecstacy

and grandeur, my man

takes me on tours

through the anterooms of lieder.

Then on, into the spacious

emotional mess of opera.

 

No. 2

At a reception in a church basement

I sat across from a widow.

We ate potato salad and discussed men,

while mine, in red suspenders

and baggy dungarees, wandered the crowd.

The widow said she could never go

for a man who was too feminine,

with sideways looks at the red suspenders.

She said a man who cooks

and cleans and fusses around

in my turf would get in the way.

It would be like going to bed

with the maid. Maybe then

her dearly departed did just that

for forty years, but it didn't seem

respectful to say so. Instead

I hummed a bit of the Mahler song

about a tea house on a bridge,

the whole scene reflected

upside down in the water.

It cleared my head.

 

No. 3

Once my man's heart foofed out

and he had to have new hoses put in.

He's got a zipper on his chest

and a seam up one leg,

three deep round scars

on his belly, from the drains.

I touch them with my finger tips,

stroking ocean ripples or the mysterious

purple horizon of mountains

that mark the skyline

between here, and there.

 

He loves to touch my breasts

because they are small and soft:

sparrows, skylarks, he says.

He likes to hold my face in his hands.

 

When they opened his rib cage

they found songs

from Das Lied von der Erde,

Mahler's Eighth Symphony,

and the entire Ring. There were also

finches and cardinals, some puffins,

a pair of blue-footed boobies

doing a mating dance,

some endangered species, a quetzal,

an emerald toucanet.

They were left undisturbed

so that when we kiss

they fly between his rib cage

and mine, singing and nesting,

fluttering in both of our bodies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Barbara Van Noord has published in many literary magazines, including The Alaska Review, The American Scholar, Kalliope, Nimrod, the minnesota review, The Seattle Review, Poem, and others. She is also the author of a full length book of poetry, The Three Hands of God.