Three Poems Kelly Dolejsi Who Shall Say? If I when my husband is sleeping and my two daughters are sleeping dance through my house, bare toes on the wood floor, robe forgotten on the piano bench — if I listen to the wind in the green world, if I dance carefully among the roses and aspens onto the sidewalk near the purple weeds, if I shake as though I were on a tree, if I dance to the donut shop, if I dance to the football field -- if I stop dancing, if I lie down and rest on the cottony grass, would I belong only to myself? Would I dance back home? Forty I couldn’t wait to be forty. The established tree. Sweet anniversary. No longer would I be a chair passing time until the master sits to write, a curtain wishing to be closed, opened, touched and moved. One can count on order in this life, the smooth one-to-the-next, the dogma of lines. The poem. I eagerly read ahead, sure the window would come to know its drapes, the seat would contain all knowledge of human knees. Then I turned. They found me sprawled in the meadow beneath a valance of green leaves, nearly forgetting a life measured in rows, a concrete world I had arranged: a wall for the syllables of my window, a floor to roll my chair, a door propped open by unfilled space. A Letter to Emily Dickinson I am the kind who hears God in the feet of a friend walking the stairs to my front porch, in my daughter’s night-time cries. I hear the bear at my neighbor’s trash, his feet heavy and strange on the concrete, and also God, light and routine. God in my husband’s bicycle around 5 o’clock. The squeak of the swing. The grasp of a fist. The little green bell. No need to go looking. Emily, I’m writing to say I agree with you. God exists within the brain, just as syllable exists within sound — and without, if one reads as I do, listening in the silence. Or so I read you, right or wrong. I hear your poetry in my brain, as I hear God, as I hear anything at all. |
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About the Author: Kelly Dolejsi is a climbing instructor with an MFA from Emerson College. Her work has been published most recently in Timberline Review, North American Review, Fifth Wednesday, Denver Quarterly, West Texas Literary Review, Allegro, Fiolet and Wing, Vine Leaves Literary Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and 1001.