Teaching Day Aubade
This anxious spring, two
of my students become lovers,
and on Tuesday evenings
I walk home after class
under the unimaginably
tender buds of the still-spare
limbs that seam this star-flecked
air. Across town, the new pair
climb the staircase to his rooms,
their hands another set
of constellated branches
hopelessly entwined.
Light from the hallway
stretches its thin neck
across the bed, her bare
feet. He puts on some music.
And when she goes
for a glass of water and finds
his plate in the sink—a gleaming,
pockmarked moon—she lifts
one damp crumb on her fingertip
and presses it, like a stamp,
to her tongue. The poems
we read in class today run
through them now like fish to sea—
their urgency, their flash—
in this final incomprehensible
joy before sleep.
***
Still Life with Caviar and Crayons
The Russian Vodka Room isn’t what it
used to be, not like when you lived here.
A bit shabbier, more well-lit so the wear
on the vinyl seats shows, no one at the piano,
a thin string of Christmas lights marking off
the hallway to the bathroom. And yet, here’s Olga—
could it really be the same?—taking a break
from her romance novel to wave you in
as she writes some indecipherable Cyrillic
into the air over her shoulder. She brings out caviar,
blinis, crème fresh, and dumplings, then four icy
vials of terrible vodka: garlic pepper and dill,
apricot pear, horseradish, and finally
strawberry. This could almost be you again,
but for your daughter uptown, running circles
in the hotel room, crayons scattered across
the bedspread where she’s napped all week
between trips to the museum, the park, the kosher
brunch you can’t get anywhere else. There’s something
so wretched about trying to revisit the past,
as if it’s out there in the ether hanging on
and waiting for you: the lovers you’d forgive
if you could, the pleasure you might remember
to feel, the luck you’d know enough to be grateful for.
That better version of yourself you’ve become
with time, but younger, beautiful still, nothing
weighting you to this cold November ground.
But the world is older, too, isn’t it? No one’s
waiting out there for you to find the bookmark
you planted like a flag in the past. Shabbier,
yes, more well-lit. Everything suddenly clear
as the vodka in Olga’s outstretched hand.
–Keetje Kuipers
***
Keetje Kuipers has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. Keetje is an Associate Professor at Auburn University where she is Editor of Southern Humanities Review.
