Duet

Written by Lisa Russ Spaar, Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Creative Writing Program, Dept. of English, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Duet

            New Year’s Eve

Two sisters side by side,
benched at the gleaming fin

of the living room’s out-of-tune baby grand,
work out a mash-up, Adele’s “Hello”

& Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,”
Hello, it’s me .  .  . , Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy,

voices by turns treble, then cemetery-dusked,
meandering, & hungry

as the sinew-tracks of moles
sponging December’s yard,

painted mouths of iced puddles,
branchless leaves snaring the window

with inhuman gale.
One swallows this heavy beauty,

rolls the mordent perfume
back to bloom as the other slips out

of autumn’s whalebone stave, descant.
They sing as if still girls.  As if before

love’s scarlet evidence, & not, like the year,
the trees, already moved, moved through.

© Lisa Russ Spaar.  From Orexia:  Poems  (Persea Books, 2017)