Two Poems:

Six at the Beginning

                    means:
                   When ribbon grass is pulled up, the sod comes with it.
                   – I Ching

You know this one. He's old.
And rich. He can do what he
wants. It would even be boring,
but there's a threat to the soil.
She has the naked glance of
fourteen, hair tucked beneath

her cap, and he wants to take
that, the lustrous unveiling.
It's hard to be without the cash
to crush a fat old man, hard to
face it, as you julienne the carrots
in his wife's kitchen. She stands

with a knife in her hand as he
comes downstairs. The curls fall
like ribbons, filling the hollow
at her neck. And though we
want to say at the end that she
recovers wholly, it isn't true.

Six at the Beginning Again

                   means:
                   Hold to him in truth and loyalty;
                   This is without blame.
                   Truth, like a full earthen bowl:
                   Thus in the end
                   Good fortune comes from without.
                   – I Ching

Love was, I thought, a fire
you set, or failed to set.
Those cold nomadic years,
scouring sand beneath
my feet, I hunted the earthen
bowl, fragile and lovely,

watching Ezekiel's wheel
turn the sky awake. But I
was wrong to think love was
fortune sprung from within,
deservingness stored up so
God could see. It was luck,

all of us fortune-cursed or bit
or blessed. One morning I woke
with the bowl in my hands,
this lover come from where?
Hold to him in truth and
loyalty. This is without blame.

Deborah Bogen
The Gettysburg Review
Volume 19, Number 1
Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by The Gettysburg Review.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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