Estha Weiner grew up in Portland and attended Portland schools before heading to New York for college and her adult life. In this first poem, “As I look Down on you, I love you,” set in her New York City apartment, we can feel another form of the weight of social isolation. The speaker takes pleasure in watching the preparations for a small dinner party, almost as if she is an additional, unseen guest. There is a feeling of magic, as things appear⎯ the salad bowl, the wine. But there is also a kind of longing here, the way we can only observe and enjoy vicariously. And mentioning Anthony Bourdain and Prospero, who had to break his magic, plus the disappearance in the dark, remind us that darkness too is part of this lovely communal creation.
In “Lilies,” Weiner reminds us of both the light and the dark sides of art, and perhaps the way they become so blended together it’s hard to separate beauty from the darker places it has been. Monet, yes, but also Lautrec, the back alleys, women of the night in broad day….
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry Editor
As I look down on you, I love you
Summer, 2020
from my back balcony
on your communal roof:
I view where you’ve placed
a rectangular table,
so humans can dine together
socially, at a distance, after 7.
First, you prepare the barbeque,
and set the table –
I like to watch you
turn each piece of chicken –
Then a salad bowl appears,
and then the wine,
other humans now
relishing the time.
Tall, lean, and elegantly greying –
Anthony Bourdain or Prospero –
Three nights a week,
you recreate the feast
which lasts beyond
the dark,
until it disappears
Lilies
While Monet’s gardeners at Giverny
were cultivating waterlilies,
Lautrec was setting up his easel
in a squalid corner
of a back alley
in Montmartre, wild
with long grass, shrubs, and thickets.
To this horticulture,
he summoned women of the night
to pose
in the light
of day.
Estha Weiner has published four books of poetry, at the last minute, In the Weather of the World, The Mistress Manuscript, Transfiguration Begins at Home. She teaches, among other places, in the City College of New York and the Writers Voice. She has also taught in Maine’s Stonecoast Writers Conference.
Image at top: Kathy Bradford, Lunch Painting, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 80 in., 2018.