MEMENTO MORI: ICE STORM

Black as the estuary at night, eleven
crows fly past my bay window
just ahead of the storm. Years ago,
I would have thought them portentous.
Now, I understand what’s random
and what’s real. As I read the news,
ice falls from the sill. It shatters,
like your diagnosis, on the sidewalk.

A sign in front of the church cautions,
in red marker, to watch for falling ice.
No warning proves sufficient for the danger
of walking through this world. Two traffic lights
outside my window alternate signals all night—
red and green. Stop, go. Stay, run away.

JULY

The night we plan our move from 103rd Street to 102nd Street, we eat at a picnic table in Riverside Park with the dog. I lived on these same two streets with my first husband and my dog twenty-three years earlier. I recall Martha Nussbaum’s lectures on eternal return and watch the fireflies flit through the July night. My daughter sees them and murmurs “eyes.” She takes your hand and brings it to her lips, something she never did to her father whose foul moods and stern commands always frightened her.

Louise Bourgeois writes about her first sculptures—“At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering. To escape, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers—sometimes it was still warm. I would make little figures.”

Walking up the hill from the picnic tables, the unseasonal breeze feels like the end of summer on the bike path, years ago, just days before school began. You hold a firefly but my daughter has moved on. She wears her Joan of Arc expression. As if the world were an illusion that only she can fathom.

Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). Her publications include American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, New England Review, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director and co-edits Slapering Hol Press. She lives in New York City.