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