ISBN 1-930907-54-0
Poetry, 172 pages
Pure Heart Press

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THE FORBIDDEN

 

There’s always been something forbidden
to women
apples
a last look
at Sodom and Gomorrah
that box left at Pandora’s.

Bluebeard’s latest bride wore a ring
of keys at her side.
Honeymoon and the weeks after
opening locks
entering rooms
inspecting the contents
but in the central corridor
of her attention
the one door her husband denied her.

Nor could the key be ignored
bumping bruises into her hip
snagging her silks
thrusting itself into her hand
whenever she reached for one of the others.

Nights it kept her awake.
What was behind that door?
What? What?
When she could sleep
she dreamed of bolts
thrown back
latches lifted.
But it was fitting
a key into a lock
she dreamed of most
the graphic insertion
the twists
that climaxed in her waking.

Yet it wasn’t what she’d expected
when it finally happened
to her nor
is it for any of us
when we open the door of an unlit room
and see the dark leap back
to make space for us.

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INCEST

 

Don’t tell
anything
that’s not the truth
I’ve decided.

The child I was
Electra
Lot’s daughter
knew no one
could love her
more than Daddy.
I wanted him
to be my mother
father
dolly
playmate
audience
provider
world
god and universe.

He died
one December.
I was nearly 29.
When I found out
at 32
I’d been adopted
my first thought
before other shocks
came jolting in:
I could have
married him.

 

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MATISSE IN MOROCCO

 

From among the many seductresses of color
Matisse took several mistresses

though he surely favored cerise over the others.
Even their splendid names

delighted him, Bokara, magenta, indigo, coral.
He draped them

in floral brocades, geometric patterns and arabesques
repeated as motif

in background cushions, jardinières, wallpaper,
carpets and tablecloths.

Like a gambler who stakes everything
on red,

he understood the full devastation of black.
Color was a language

for interiors, his private studio ablaze
with statement.

Travel to Morocco gave him exotic pearl light,
luminous and paradisal,

a view of Tangier, the Casbah Gate from his terrace:
window as metaphor.

Amid the smell of anisette, mimosa and odalisques
drenched in patchouli,

beneath the heady light decanted from the yellow carafe
of the North African sun,

these lush repetitions to prove how a leaf wraps around
a window frame

or how a corner turns with blue to follow crimson
borders behind a canary vase

which seems to rise out of a saffron curtain
that reverses

itself in an elaborate pantaloon or tangerine caftan
like the fauvist’s dream

he carried to the very end with scissors and paste.
Even then he gorged

on light to find a solution in emerald or scarlet
for a life without shadows.

 

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Sarah Brown Weitzman grew up in Port Washington (Long Island) New York. She received a M.A. in 1957 from New York University where subsequently she joined the faculty. She also taught English in a New York City high school, ending her career as a director of an on-site teacher-training program sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers.

Sarah Brown Weitzman’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including North American Review, Poet & Critic, American Writing, Poem, The Wisconsin Review, Long Island Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, The Nassau Review, Poetry Now, Kansas Quarterly, The Windless Orchard, The Northwest Florida Review, Potomac Review, and The Bellingham Review. Weitzman received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1984 and was a finalist twice in The Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman First Book contest. A finalist in the Associated Writing Programs first poetry contest, she was selected to read in The Shakespeare Folger Library’s Mid-day Muse series. In 2003 she was a finalist for the Foley Prize and the National Looking Glass Chapbook Competition. Her second chapbook, THE FORBIDDEN, was published in 2004 by Pudding House Publications.

Retired, Weitzman lives and writes in Delray Beach, Florida