Sample Poems by Eileen Moeller

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Kissing Solitude

It is a time for shrinking light, as the year slips downhill toward winter, with its icy taunts, its leafless metaphors for death. My nights will become the bottom of the ocean. Time to curl up tight, hold on to whatever warmth comes to you, let good cheer bubble up from the depths on blossoms of breath.

My eyes, two lamps alight at twilight, two pearls, gleaming on a girl who has no fear of the dark. Her hand lands like a pink bird near her lips as she readies herself to kiss whatever comes.

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Shanty

after Reema Sherry

I stand for hours holding the shucking knife, smelling the sea on them, and the musk of other women in the shanty, all of us born to do this work, the pale sea egglets sliding out of their flat fan-shaped shells, their sound akin to raindrops, wet and slapping the great rocks near the shore, the skill it takes to get them cleanly out, whole and undamaged, the clack of shells as they hit the cavernous barrel, the rickety chatter of living mollusks opening, closing, opening, closing, a sleetier sound, pond ice cracking, the little crabs and starfish dredged up with them, like jewels against the gray and silver of minnow or infant flounder.

This, I think, is the delicious quiet that is a Nantucket winter. This working with your hands, this respite from the widow’s walk, that fills, like creamy scallop flesh, the emptiness of the bowl.

Nor’easter on the Way

Roiling ocean, the white lace foaming the shore, the waterfall and crash of the breaking waves, the seething currents, the give and take of things earthly, the salty, kelp-strewn water, and waves curling, dotting the sand with a stranding of jelly fish. Out of the earth’s bag of waters, we somehow came, not that long ago, out of God’s clay-shaping hands, so much water in us, we might have wriggled and scuttled up rocks to get here. Though I merely came from Boston, where a girl must go into service, or find a husband to care for her. She must manage a life, despite him and his wanderings. How the ocean grabs at me now, pulling me toward the coming turbulence, how I feel its hunger to take us home on its undertow, hold our lifeless bodies to its dark-mother heart. Delicate as sandpipers, we women hold up our skirts to hop and dance along the storm’s periphery while we can, before it makes landfall, wind abrading the empty beach. It is a comfort to feign bravado, when little remains in reach.

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The Nightgown

Nothing existed then, but the whitely chilled world, and a moonlit bed. Be luxurious, cold said. You are all over warm, and must crown yourself with bodily desire. Then to have nothing, but beating heart and spark, the smooth snug between bodies, skin and hair, tongue fire, woolen blankets, delicious in the crystal air.

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Old Thunder

No one in town sees us, whole or cut away, without taking in his obsession—my despair. Too old, he is, but goes off nevertheless. I begged him to stay, to carve his lust for conquest into whalebone, the two of us lending each other what fire he might have left. But ships came into harbor calling his name, and he went down to meet and woo the captains. Most of whom surely chuckled to themselves at the thought of taking on such a long-beard. And the day will come, when I will have to watch him fade to a tiny gray haired speck, knowing he might be finally lost to me. The mark of his disappeared face on me, the curve of his spine, the lightness of his footsteps, the smell of mould and earth threading him to a particle, the crucible of his wasted fire. Young as I be, I must wear his absence like a shroud.