LindaAnn Lo Schiavo – Two Poems
Romance Attacks My Dance Card
The thunder polka of a new romance
Began today on my left foot, the one
Believed to lead suggestiveness astray.
True love’s a waltz: it’s measured and mature
Like patience set to action. Dance decodes
The blood, translates the shadows of the soul,
Emotions dipping, swelling at the door
Called “sense.” Romance corsaged my heart and wrists
Again. Will filled my dance card out because
That blinding barrier shores up dreamwork.
Hopes rubbed together. Sanity, once my
Sly chaperone, no longer is with us.
Acts of Light
She’s old, my neighbor, planting daffodils
And other bulbs, these plump brown hopes asleep
For now, when she addresses me, that voice
Deep, curved like a construction hook, as if
She’s building with that voice things both of us
Will need. A kaffir lily, bare root still,
Is offered for inspection, years away
From blooming orange trumpets, syllables
Blown bright. There’s so little light left now.
Inside I watch her bordering the beds,
Determined, making order to impose
Her colors — — to oppose a nothingness.
Author’s Statement on Beauty
Beauty is the electricity of strange eyes meeting mine — and I need to know more.
Beauty is each impulse that makes us drop the dishcloth, the phone, the remote — so we can pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a camera to “fix” it in some form and try to make it our own.
Wanting to discover new expressions of beauty is what drives me, even when I think maybe it’s all been said and done.
LindaAnn Lo Schiavo is presently completing her second documentary film on Texas Guinan [1884-1933] and the Prohibition Era. When she exits the celluloid closet, she weaves according to her fancy. She has published short fiction in Metamorphose Magazine, and her formal verse has appeared in Measure, Atavic, The Bacon Review, and Nous, a magazine printed in Germany with a French title and British editors.