Betsy Sholl

Betsy Sholl Poems

The child takes her first journey
through the inner blue world of her mother's body,
blue veins, blue eyes, frail petal lids.
...

Fog dense as a bed sheet hung at the window,
and through that white blindness come
the eerie cries of cows moaning in the field
...

He needs a bigger body, bull fiddle
to make that thump, that deeper pulse, he needs
...

4.

Wharves with their warehouses sagging
on wooden slats, windows steamed up
and beaded with rain—it's a wonder
...

Well-dressed, demure, jammed into those
politely arranged desks, it's hard to be
serious, but we are. No one even parts lips
to acknowledge what used to drive us crazy
...

They call me Babe and make a kissing noise
from inside their bars and inside their rage.
Most of them are men, though they act like boys
...

You think you can handle these things:
sunlight glinting off a red Jaguar
honking at the old woman who has snagged
...

To stave off trouble, the old bluesmen are singing,
without a doubt, singing-on doorsteps, in bare yards
with folding chairs tipsy on tree roots. No tape rolling,
...

Bedraggled feathers like bonnets
that would fly off if they weren't strapped,
kazoo voiced, a chorus of crying dolphins
...

Nowhere to nest, to rest their heads,
like starlings scattered by gunshot—
...

The wind dresses itself in trees, handbills,
dust balls, feathers and rags—anything to be seen—
unlike the upright clock in its polished box
...

We'd been sipping wine at an outdoor café
in late afternoon light, my friend and I, our words
...

Maybe we will never yank out the old root
of our wounds, and if it begins to die
that's only because one day we will die too,
...

Having climbed to the thinnest branch that will
hold, I must be more ponderous to the tree,
and less musical than the birds I've scared off,
...

Like its first three notes, rising to beg
for a fourth, then a fifth, a song does not lie
down inside of nothing. And though a rock
may look complete, it's got a history, it's still
...

The young man's story was set on a cliff
with many sheer angles of descent—
fourteen pages of single-spaced onion-skin
...

An apartment collapse in Turkey, the rise
of heroin, death of girl babies in China—
...

Betsy Sholl Biography

Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet and a former poet laureate of Maine. She was appointed by Governor John Baldacci to the position in 2006 and held it until 2011. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, "Otherwise Unseeable (University of Wisconsin Press, March,2014), the winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry and Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009). Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Orion Magazine, Field, Triquarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission. She was one of the seven founding members of Alice James Books, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been a visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh and at Bucknell University. She grew up in Brick Township, New Jersey, and has an MFA in poetry writing from Vermont College as well as an M.A. from the University of Rochester and a BA in English Literature from Bucknell University. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband. She and her husband, Doug Sholl, moved to Maine in 1983 after stints in Boston and Big Stone Gap, Virginia.)

The Best Poem Of Betsy Sholl

Lullaby In Blue

The child takes her first journey
through the inner blue world of her mother's body,
blue veins, blue eyes, frail petal lids.

Beyond that unborn brackish world so deep
it will be felt forever as longing, a dream
of blue notes plucked from memory's guitar,

the wind blows indigo shadows under streetlights,
clouds crowd the moon and bear down on the limbs
of a blue spruce. The child's head appears—

midnight pond, weedy and glistening—
draws back, reluctant to leave that first home.
Blue catch in the mother's throat,

ferocious bruise of a growl, and out slides
the iridescent body—fish-slippery
in her father's hands, plucked from water

into such thin densities of air,
her arms and tiny hands stutter and flail,
till he places her on her mother's body,

then cuts the smoky cord, releasing her
into this world, its cold harbor below
where a blue caul of shrink-wrap covers

each boat gestating on the winter shore.
Child, the world comes in twos, above and below,
visible and unseen. Inside your mother's croon

there's the hum of an old man tapping his foot
on a porch floor, his instrument made from one
string nailed to a wall, as if anything

can be turned into song, always what is
and what is longed for. Against the window
the electric blue of cop lights signals

somebody's bad news, and a lone man walks
through the street, his guitar sealed in dark plush.
Child, from this world now you will draw your breath

and let out your moth flutter of blue sighs.
Now your mother will listen for each one,
alert enough to hear snow starting to flake

from the sky, bay water beginning to freeze.
Sleep now, little shadow, as your first world
still flickers across your face, that other side

where all was given and nothing desired.
Soon enough you'll want milk, want faces, hands,
heartbeats and voices singing in your ear.

Soon the world will amaze you, and you
will give back its bird-warble, its dove call,
singing that blue note which deepens the song,

that longing for what no one can recall,
your small night cry roused from the wholeness
you carry into this broken world.

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