Elizabeth J. Coleman

New Year's Eve

  We almost stayed in town and missed this snow,
  almost missed pine branches’ droop,

  reminding us of snows that said there’d be no school
  when they grew deep on a childhood stucco wall.

  We almost didn’t see hillocks of snow
  perched on the ledge of our cottage window,

  branches weighed down from
  morning’s ivory fall.

  Now tiny white flags have been unfurled,
  silent flares lit to greet the coming year.

  In this time, when snow’s so rare,
I’ve learned a word that isn’t mine to say

  for this mysterious ichor that’s appeared
  in the night, and that I whisper

  to respect the music of the moment’s silence,
  to respect those who knew of what they spoke,

  those who had a specific word
  four thousand years ago

  for softly falling snow.

(An earlier version “New Year’s Eve” (as “Snow on New Year’s Eve in the Anthropocene”) appeared in Blue Line, Issue 40, Volume XL)


Body and Soul

My mother pulled at her pearls
gently, elegantly, a hummingbird

touching a flower. I, too, carry my melancholy
wherever I go, a turtle portaging home

on its back, sad before it’s time to mourn.
Now I’m trying to fall in love

with the present. But that means giving
up the comfort of regret, means accepting

my parents’ absence after all these years.
Even in my childhood, they mourned

one another, grief poured into Sidecars
from the silver jigger with the other

ingredients: Cognac, Cointreau,
lemon juice. In my dreams, they’re like two

jazz pianists playing Body and Soul on twin
baby grands at an open-air concert, the last day

of August in the Catskills on a perfect night,
looking at each other tenderly

across that enormous black divide.

(“Body and Soul” was first published in Colorado Review, Summer, 2020)


The Clarity of Light

This morning by mistake I saw
a headline that if the earth moves

a tiny bit from its axis, it will
spell disaster. I tried to look away

too late.            Still, it never rains
in a Matisse, and the mail comes

twice a day. And the boy, the music
student, will serenade us silently

for eternity. Just as tiny ice
crystals floating within clouds

at high altitudes cause astonishing
sun glints. Just as out beyond

our solar system lies the luminescence
of the Milky Way. Just as wishing

to have led another life doesn’t
mean we do not love our own.

(“The Clarity of Light” was first published in Three Points Press, 9/2018, as “Matisse’s Clarity of Light)

"All three poems appear in The Fifth Generation by Elizabeth J. Coleman, Spuyten Duyvil, 2015)


About the Author

Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), and the author of two poetry collections, The Fifth Generation and Proof (both from Spuyten Duyvil Press), as well as two poetry chapbooks. She translated into French Lee Slonimsky’s Pythagoras in Love / Pythagore Amoureux, a bilingual sonnet collection. Elizabeth’s poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, and Colorado Review, as well as in several anthologies, including Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020). Elizabeth is a resident of Manhattan and Big Indian, New York.

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