Robin Scofield is the author of the chapbook And the Ass Saw the Angel as well as a forthcoming book, Sunflower Cantos, from Mouthfeel Press. She has poems appearing in The 2River View, Written River, The Mas Tequila Review, The Warwick Review, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, and New Border Anthology. Her poems have previously appeared in The Paris Review, The Texas Observer, and Western Humanities Review. She writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, Texas, and her website is http//www.robinscofield.com.
Summer 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 2
Poetry Fiction Translations Reviews
Robin Scofield
Her hands shelled peas, her working knuckles,
Her rounded fingers, nails filed to a point;
They kneaded pies, held babies, picked periwinkles
And knit an afghan after her eyesight
Had failed her because she couldn’t tell apart
The white and cream shades of her knitting yarn.
Years later, I find it in mother’s hall closet
And claim it for my own, her great-grandson
Who sprawls on and off the couch, large hands,
My face, but on his chin, a stubbled wheatfield
That transforms him, an enchanted swan
Who outgrows buttons, feathers, shirts, and beard.
I cover him up, as far as it goes, the span
Of us, with the work of my grandmother’s hand.
Due to the permanent marring of her tomorrows,
a Russian astrologer is suing the United States
for three hundred million dollars
for “ruining the natural order of things”
by NASA’s firing a probe named
Deep Impact into Comet Tempel-One
to see what kind of stuff its ice and dust
might be, altering its course, thus
sending this woman’s horoscope
wheeling out of whack and she demands
it back, her Ptolemaic universe en toto
and bucks to ease the agony of its loss.
This umbrella of gravity can fold around her ears
for all she cares so long as no stray rocks slice through
her chart which once upon a time was set in stone.
In her land of snow, a comet did blast a forest
and lay its sperm in a seam of fire and ice.
It didn’t trouble the heavens then. Now
the moon just barely holds the waters back.
© Robin Scofield
