Patricia Ranzoni

(Dreaming company...

come visit by my bed
bringing pages you’ve composed or admire
given in your truest reading voice even
when my lids clamp closed I’ll hear

no need to stage it
with performance others
might applaud or prize gestures
my eyes can’t open to

your sound close
and individual to cotton me
around and away on
or for a comfort in which I might stay )

from Another Long

Another storm

                                         and another

it doesn’t matter

                                         under her quilt

                                                         the quiet brook.

needlework

every so often a man comes
good as they with a needle
Gary certainly and Bob
not that gender has anything to do with it

Peg from outpatient surgery
Marilyn from ER
Ann when we’re both brave and braced
for two or three sticks lacing me
every two weeks with plastic tubes

see those satin-stitch scars outlining
used up veins

they’re so good I imagine the rest
French knots and fine designs

silk embroidery worked knuckles
to arms why even I have to redo
my crewel from time to time

pull it out
start again
all my fabric now
turning to skin

Husband Cut My Hair

I cannot reach it anymore. Fetch the wedding-dress scissors
from my sewing chest, my good pair to be used only for cloth,
from their blue velvet case. I know it shocks you I would ask,
the way I’ve guarded it these years letting and letting it lengthen
just for us to dance around my round hips if you still love it lie
with me now and help me let it down as long as....

and weave your fingers through these threads of me husband
if you have loved it slip again into my waves let me be your rings.
Show it as it has shown you. Dip again into its flow is it fabric
or water it doesn’t know itself or what it means.
Lift it to your lips and thank it as I have every day.

These tears....oh....because of where these fibers of my being
have been what vision settled into them what shine
they may not know again I cannot reach it anymore.

If you’ve loved the way I’ve carded and plied it by hand
until it’s spun a stellar spray down our backs, give your hands
for it to tremble into and look upon it the way a man sighs as if
he will die unless he does. Cup it like our brook being swept away
if it is that and drink it with me as it goes.

Have you loved the way the silver has swirled through the last
of my girl-black silk whisper that. The way I’ve fluted it up
into fountains being my own kind of lady if I have been yours
                                                            hold me
                                                            cut my hair my strength

                                                            I cannot reach it anymore.

Patricia Smith Ranzoni was born in Lincoln, Maine in 1940. She has worked her way since childhood as farm hand, babysitter, diner cook, summer hotel waitress, laundress, seamstress, office assistant, Avon salesgirl, wife and mother, school teacher, school director, child development specialist, counselor, education/mental health consultant, and after the onset of torsion dystonia at 43, writing as she could. She has co- founded two schools and SpiritWords: Maine Poetries Collaborative; and has been an activist in the international disability rights movement. Her first collection, Claiming, was published in 1995 by Puckerbrush Press which will bring out her second, Settling, in 1999. She maintains an author page at http://members.aol.com/pranzoni/index.html.