Andrea Potos is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Lit the Lamps Ourselves from Salmon Poetry. Her collection Yaya’s Cloth won an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. Andrea’s poems appear widely in print and online, including Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Salzburg Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, and Beloved on this Earth (Holy Cow Press). She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. with her family.
Five poems by Andrea Potos
ON SEEING A DRAFT OF ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE-
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
When I asked, the guard pointed
to the glass case draped
with burgundy cloth,
gold tassles.
I lifted the curtain
to two smallish pages
resembling parchment,
stained with an ink turned
the color of late autumn.
The letters nearly bled
into the paper.
Darking I listen;
I bent
over the case, staring
until closing,
willing the cursive script
to trick my eyes and move,
Was it a vision
or a waking dream?
willing for the hand to come alive,
the bird to not stop its song.
UPON ENTERING THE HOUSE OF THE LATE,
GREAT POET
No nightingales sang,
no ancient urns
mused aloud,
But the air–
in the midst of wide quietness–
the air met me
with a weight, a texture
like vellum bearing
an onslaught of lost words
my whole body read at once.
PORTRAIT OF EMILY BRONTE
Her tall body
like an urn of water
as she moved from cellar
to scullery,
out through parsonage doors
to the moor where she met
her match in sky, eyes
capturing cloud-race
and blue breaking travelling
like her hands across paper.
POETRY READING IN THE GALLERY OF THE ART MUSEUM
Around me the Renaissance glowed.
Unwrapped from some back rooms
of Florence and delivered here:
the infant enthroned with the angels,
Heaven’s manna tumbling, Christ
pierced and risen again
and again, Mary’s skin smooth
as a shining cloak of sorrow,
while poet after poet rose to clutch
the podium, hitch the mic to blouse
or lapel. Poet after poet kept fillling
the air with stanzas and ideas.
Shame on me, I hardly heard.
What I wanted was to dwell
among the beauty, the force
of images born
long before words claimed them.
DAUGHTER AT THE MALL
Eight years of insistence
on pants, no pink,
sometimes purple,
now she stands
in the dressing room,
full-length and breadth
before the mirror, meeting herself
at 14, wearing
a silver-belted dress above the knee,
ponytail shaken free, her lips
giving off a faint shine like hints of stars,
or Venus somewhere
in a summering sky.
The Galway Review 