https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
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 ISSN 1556-4975

OffCourse Literary Journal

 Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998


 

Poems by Sarah White

 

PanItalia

Everyone I know is fond
of this peninsula. It has given us the Sweet,
the New, the Comic, 
and the Politic.
Not to mention
the most marvelous gelato 
(my favorite is pistachio).                                                         

Its cities and its towns
have given birth 
to geniuses, some brilliant,
others wacko.

Dearest Giotto, don’t be piqued.
You have been accused by Boccaccio of
excessive homeliness. I can fix that. 

Meet me in Arezzo.
by  the Church of San Francesco, 
Piero will come and meet us
(although he isn’t born yet)
and paint us 
into his great fresco

We’ll be two jewels of the Quattrocento
a hundred years before it happens.

 

Académie Française 

            “The circumflex should be abolished.”

La pêche still wears its chic peaked cap
though some fanatics hate it.
and want it suppressed.

Take la maîtresse.
They want to strip her
of an ornament she’s worn
since Madame Du Barry
embraced her lover Louis.

To test and see
if mistresses with simpler spelling
would be more or less compelling,

in a paper sack I placed two peaches —
one French, one Anglophone.

One wore a cap, one not.
They didn’t speak. They didn’t fight.

Both ripened overnight.

 

 The Strangest and Most Natural Thing In the World

is to stand in the house of a friend, to know 
she won’t open or close the cabinets, answer 
the phone, or pull a book from the shelf again,
to think some place may exist where she’s still 
herself, though looking for her in this small 
Vermont town you find only space, and then to travel

late in the evening back to the city on the train 
and beside the track the Hudson River flows, 
all black except on the far shore where a few 
lamps light patches of deep water, yet to like 
staring into the dark aware that the river is full
of salt, slippery weeds, and creatures asleep.

 

 Shim

We were together —him
and me —more 
than we had ever been 

with anyone. Once, while moving, 
we saw the shelves  
seemed likely to tip and fall.
He said we could put a wooden sliver 
called a shim between a tipsy shelf
and an uneven floor. 

Our shelves did not fall,
and  I thought the same 
would be true of him

until one day he fainted and was gone
and, with him, all the good  
I knew in the world —except
                                   
the good that I remembered, 
and nouns and verbs that fit 
in verses about the wavy floors
I’ve lived upon, 
and shelves that would stand 
because any spaces 
between them and the floor
would be filled with a shim. 

Because of him 
I know its name,
its work, its ways of fitting
and filling.

 

 Winch

The enemies of winch  
are any inches of space between where
something is and where you want it..

Long, fallen vines found in the woods 
may be brought to a lawn
and piled by someone —

you, probably —who, 
while in the woods,
imagine an animal,

then find the material, 
Around a soundless drum
a rope or chain is wound

to let a load be bound
and dragged overland
until it’s not a chore

but an idea
winched to your lawn
from the vine-hung forest.

 


In the years since retiring from college French teaching, Sarah White has devoted herself to painting, poetry, and memoir. Dos Madres published The Unknowing Muse in 2014. It was succeeded in 2015 by Wars Don’t Happen Anymore from Deerbrook Editions. The lyric memoir, The Poem Has Reasons: a story of far love was published by Dos Madres Press in 2022. (reviewed by Ricardo Nirenberg.) She lives in a retirement community in Western Massachusetts.



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