Rosemarie Rowley
Ophelia
If she were freighted in gold, in a splendid barque
In which to log her passion and her pledge,
If she could see beyond the windless dark
Of her lover's despair, and not go past the edge
Of fruitful discourse, if she had met
His pleas with rendered accounts of joy
He would be hers, her own: not yet
Remembered as a timid, rancorous boy--
A quest for others, his father's ghost to trace
In the covert coven of the mind, a past
To mitigate the murder and disgrace
And leave him to simplicity; his last
Breath to Horatio--"there are other worlds than this
How costly they are, yet purchased with a kiss."
Perdita
Banished because of a testy father's rage,
Your life is precious to your faithful mother.
Your presence scarcely registered on the page:
Yet you and she would never find each other.
You would be there as mere ephemera,
Your absence signifying patriarchal guilt
On the imagined coastline of Bohemia,
Where nature flourishes, and nothing gilt.
Yet only art can rescue the act of stealth
By which you became exile, like a tree
Turned from a god's pursuit of beauty's wealth,
As Daphne was chastened, to memory.
So you are here, the king in the last round
Vanquished--where you, once lost, are finally found. |
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>Mezzo Cammin featured on the blog of The Best American Poetry
>The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project Turns 50--with Emily Dickinson
>The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project at Lincoln Center, Friday, April 11th, 7-9 PM. Rhina Espaillat, Angela O'Donnell, Erica Dawson, Maryann Corbett, and others.
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| Author Erica Jong |
| Marion Ettlinger: I was raised in Queens, New York, the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants. I was educated at The High School of Music & Art and The Cooper Union, both in Manhattan. Shortly after graduation, I moved to Northern Vermont, where I lived for seventeen years. Although I have been practicing portraiture since the Sixties, it was in the early Eighties that I found my true vocation in photographing poets and writers, who as subjects remain compelling and irresistible to me still. Using only natural light and black and white film, I continue this work based in Manhattan.
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