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Roger Bonner Lady on a Stone Bench Lady on a stone bench, In your satin dress, In your ermine cape, Late, late after a ball, Lost in waltzes, A teetering world. The chauffeur’s waiting… Think, think. The years like gravel Crunch underfoot And your bench is a pedestal, And your children were never born. Stay with your perfect poise, The chiselled nose, The head already a bust, The legs crossed, Disclosing ever so slender turn of marble. Stay, stay. Do not let those ivy hands reach for your rose. Portrait in Gray A jumble of soldiers yellowing in the 30’s air on some alpine farmstead – a clattering stop to pose before trees that look like worn toilet brushes. Canonry rusting, carbines hitched on shoulders in uniforms not yet starched with blood. You, papa, in the center, always in the center, a cork in a vortex refusing to disappear, cap set at a jaunty angle slipping to eyes that never listened, that only rose above rim of newspaper at the supper table like two mocking moons. December Day Cut off from work on a winter day, I walk into reality – A path, a field, a hill, The trees like plucked umbrellas – Through crustaceous snow, Through mulch and mud, Letting the city shrink slug size. Here nobody counts the countless; The bookkeeper is dead. Only a fence, where rooks rasp the air, Demarks space as I lose my way In the forest drip. Then a clearing with hoar of moss Where the sun squats on a trunk. Last midges dance about its head As it rises to plod down the slope Through sodden corn To the horizon, Leaving the evening sky ajar, Flashing a final blade Of light in my face.