Friday Find: The Second Blush by Molly Peacock

The Second Blush by Molly Peacock

From Booklist

Poems that rhyme, what joy. Homey poems about an unexpected late marriage to the calm man a shy boy from the past became, what bliss. Sweet poems of bed, cats, and kitchen time that abruptly crack open to reveal the chasm of fear and loss: powerful stuff. Peacock is in peak form in these seductive poems that swing and twirl so prettily, then suddenly, deviously, shockingly carom from contentment to despair and back again, just like life. And how spangled and vivid each domestic scene is, how electric with feelings and shadowed by death, like paintings by Bonnard or Vuillard. Because cancer made the marriage seem “a doomed possibility,” because the poet is confronting the haunting absence of a beloved cat, a smashed cup, a scar, dreams of epic cold and a dead sister. But then there is also a “jeweled” drop of water.

Our Minor Art

We make love better unobserved — not that
we'd ever throw the new cats off the bed.
We let them sit there, turning their backs,
but listening anyway. We don't move in bed
quite with the freedom we might without them,
but the fact that they stay is like being
visited by minor gods. And we love the minor.
It inspires us because we like being
close to its genius — something we might come
to understand beyond our human bounds
but near to our kind — not like the major,
a capitalized God, for instance, or
upper-case Art. Those are beyond us,
yet our transformation here in bed is art,
something best made unobserved, even by the cats,
who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.

http://www.mollypeacock.org/poetry_prose/blush.html