Barry Spacks


This Work of Words

This work of words, what is it for?
My daughter reads lines on "the red dress of fear"
by her newly discovered poet, Anna
Czekanowicz, who speaks of a life
with "a different lover every year"
but never "shanghaied by sex," "the world's
burnt pans," who maybe even now,
as she irons her daughter's incredibly small
undershirts, is pondering a poem
on the girl, full grown in Gdansk, as a great
brain-surgeon, teacher, artist, arranging
her socks and jumper, consulting on clothes
for years from now on a wedding day
as if one might dress a daughter in love,
keep close to the skin a mother's concern
that a child should know only happiness, oh,
Anna, this, write this and wrest
a grace for us all from grudging fate
take years, years, to get it right!


On an Etching by Gustave Dore

The print shows Little Red Riding Hood
beside the Wolf in Grandma's nightgown.
She's wary in that narrow bed
for something's strange, but she's settling down.

The Wolf, meanwhile, who'd meant to consume her,
then lone-wolf-it back to the wild well fed,
as night follows night feels a shift in his humor,
her very presence his daily bread.

It looks like he's moving in for good
as she irons his shirts, bears his wolflets.
Awake in the night he's scheming profits,
passionate to protect her -- should

a Woodsman arrive to set her free
he'd rip out his throat! He dotes upon her.
And Little Red, has it made her happy
to own a Wolf because he'd own her?

And Grandma, remember Grandma? -- wolfed up
before this domestic transformation
from hunger to thrift? -- well, life is tough
even in fairytale translation.

That gaze you get from a wolf! Ice blue.
"Family Values"! "Wolf Makes Good"!
But such long teeth the better to eat you,
such ancient howling in the wood.


To a Young One

With your fine addiction to hope you've yet
to fill your backpack with watch-maker's gimlet,
the necessary badges and skillsaw,
weapons for the journey.

Anonymous lovers your drug of choice,
you'll give careless welcomes to strangers in alleys
out of your dread of "the Nice," of those
who'd slam shiny doors across your mouth.

You somehow believe it would help to save you,
provide you an ocean on which to drift
in the kindly sun's admiring heat
if I whispered words of brightness about you,

stung praises in ears of passersby
who'd spread on the news. Of course you'd change,
not recognizing the self you'd meet
once the buzz came full circle, reaching you.

And yet many claim eternal life
to travel through voices by the thousands,
a body throwing off its name
in just such an exercise of sound.

See, I've started the circuit already:
you move through the world of our thought by abstraction,
peacefully floating on sun-warmed waters
with salt upon the lips of your slight smile.

Barry Spacks, author of two novels and seven poetry collections, shoe size 11B, earns his keep as a persistently visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara after many years of teaching at M.I.T.