Landscape in Two Colors

  A Collage

  1. Winter

  Breath on a window

  resembles a plain of snow.

  White is heated cold.

  When they moved into the A frame,

  she sang Take the A Train

  with an annoying, deep-breath beat.

  She pressed her face to the door glass

  so she could see her notes

  block out the open space.

  He painted, rearranging the faces of women,

  turning their bodies into wholesome prairies

  of brush-fire lines.

  She grew into a landscape woman

  who had no love of words

  and their curling-tongue torso of noise.

  2. Spring

  Her appetite was all; encompassing

  her broken compass mind

  that waved from right

  to sinister left.

  She wanted to grow as big as the earth,

  to swallow it like a living aphrodisiac

  that would encourage her wildness

  and to prepare her for recreating a world

  without leftovers.

  First, she hid a lone twinkie under the bed,

  a goldensweet secret,

  then she hung licorice like bedroom vines

  and imagined food to be meals of planets,

  lakes, and mountains on her celestially blank, china plate.

  3. Summer

  He used their full-view mirror to practice pirouettes.

  He considered his nightly movements as a violation

  in tights but, in truth, the tutu was too tiny to try on.

  His paintings were no longer rural, but cosmopolitan, neon scenes.

  The city was a woman barer than bare,

  he was knotted tight at the height of her hip,

  blinded by the glitter and feathers on her thighs.

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  4. Fall

  If you asked her

  her name before she could speak,

  in answer

  she would raise her forefinger

  like an accusing arrow aimed at the sky.

  Now, her voice is a constant harvest

  of terse words.

  She remembers when he watered her thoughts

  into bloom, before he cut them into even rows.

  This last decade recalls her lost years,

  pulling at her meat, first like a stubborn crow,

  then more softly, as an insistent, toddling

  tug at her sleeve.

  5. Winter

  The evening is coffee without cream.

  Her black, tailored bob is the most recent descendant

  in a long line of hairstyles he hates.

  He wished her hair to be ancestral platinum snow,

  a glacier Marilyn Monroe,

  and longed her stomach to be an ice-covered lake.

  He thought a woman should taste like lemon sorbet.

  But she was closer to bubbling kettle steam,

  a hot chocolate Josephine.

  6. Spring

  The sun is a brass pendulum swinging between seasons.

  Ice dies only to be revived.

  Both boots and sneakers wait by the door,

  taking alternate turns outside.

  Barefoot, indoors,

  She looks at his watch, waiting for warmth.

  By the next sun shift

  she has moved

  to a ticker-tape town

  full of height and haughtiness.

  Being a better woman

  has become her occupation.

  It becomes her.

  Professing

  nothing of her own,

  she is released like a balloon

  on inaugural day,

  and refuses

  to come back to earth

  like tawdry confetti.

  - Kat Isacson