Judy Kronenfeld’s third book of poetry, Shimmer, was published by WordTech Editions in 2012. Her most recent prior full collection is Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2nd edition, Antrim House, 2012); her most recent chapbook is Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems, as well as the occasional short story, personal essay and review have appeared in many print and online journals such as Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal, as well as in a variety of anthologies including Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State, 2009), Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple, 2010), and Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse, 2012). She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Dept., UC Riverside, and Associate Editor of the online poetry journal, Poemeleon. Visit her website here and follow her monthly blog here.
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At 70
The gaze and shade of the play
of attention, the gift of Eros (must I
give it up?): absorption of the eyes—
as if a man’s could draw
the glistening from my own
like sun
or our glances, intertwined,
were eyebeams travelling
to and fro
transferring “eye-babies,”
as in a poem
by Donne.
What pleasure when such
remembered moments ripple
over my skin
though the me
in them has multiply
transmuted
and these new cells
so ineluctably programmed
for demise.
But what pleasure
to remember—
that picnic table
in the grove,
birches shaking
their shimmering hair,
droplets of light
flying, sun swords,
shade sprinklings,
light like slantwise
golden arrows
in feathered eyes.
Free-Floating Anxiety
3 A.M., again, the hinge
of the universe scrapes,
the house lurches. I was
a jewel in a dark
velvet-lined case, prized,
my light pleasantly muffled,
I was swaddled in plush, my cheek
smooth, but the house
has slipped off its pylons—
I must find the pliers
the wrenches—the house
has wrenched itself
from foursquare and drifted
to high seas, creaky as a ship
in rough weather, and I—
promoted to captain,
unasked—must tend
to the bridge, the engine,
the load, while the bow,
furious, rises and dips—
Until you awake too,
tired, but halcyon calm,
and sigh on your robe,
and lead me below deck,
and turn on the TV. And at last I doze
to the only thing on—
Dunkirk documentaries in quaint
black and white—my head re-moored
on your shoulder till dawn.
In the Golden Vistas
Group Home
The tarnished bathroom mirror
is a photographic slide webbed
and starred with mold—
of an unknown face.
On the rickety desk in the hall
envelopes cluster with insoluble
signs, as if tracked over
by a scold of jays.
In an alcove, ledge to ceiling,
there’s a mandala
of sun—
its afterglow a lavender moth
suffusing the mind.
In the breezeway stumbled into:
white wind.
white wind.