Marjorie Maddox
Annie Oakley
Before
Buffalo Bill shook his sombrero
to start the crowd clapping for your big finale,
before your mustang lurched under your kick
each week for seventeen years,
and those in the stands of The Wild West Show
waved their arms like lariats in the dusty air,
before you tossed back your hair,
cocked that sleek rifle, and aimed
at the soaring glass balls
that splattered like pigeons at your bullet’s touch,
you were just
Phoebe of Patterson Township,
nine, a child with a gun,
distraught over the death of your father;
a girl walking away
from Woodington, Ohio,
into the wild woods,
where, before an audience of pine,
you would hunt food for the hungry
family you’d left behind.
Battlefield in Peacetime
Not four score seven years ago—but one
we joined our homes, our names, our aging hands
for and against the battles that would come
and treaties fired, as those from this land
of Gettysburg, the dirt that bloodied love
for love of other still. Husband, we live
out of two pasts: a weakened frontline of
dismembered plots; unplowed field left if
not remembered. We, almost pacifists
in such as love, count up all others' wars
(here, and in our lives): their fists and kisses
loaded and exploded; the way our scars
in middle-age forget to fight. Defend
to death with me our peace, my allied friend.
Marjorie Maddox is Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University. A Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and recipient of numerous awards, she has published 9 poetry collections, most recently Local News from Someplace Else. contact • website
|