Maxine Chernoff Poems

Even as an embryo, she made room for "the other guy." Slick and
bloody, she emerged quietly: Why spoil the doctor's best moment?
When Dad ran over her tricycle, she smiled, and when Mom drowned
her kittens, she curtsied, a Swiss statuette. Her teachers liked the way
...

If I were French, I'd write
about breasts, structuralist treatments
of breasts, deconstructionist breasts,
...

Choose a heavy one shaped like (a) your first ride in a car or (b) the Hitchcock leg-of-lamb, served at dinner to the unsuspecting detective. Or a light objet d'art, (c) an ice cube in whose reflection is suggested the history of the subconscious.
...

The cinema is a specific language.
— Christian Metz
What the body might guess,
what the hand requests,
what language assumes
becomes amulet,
which is to say
I am carrying your face
in a locket in a box
to a virtual location
guarded by kestrels,
suggesting the scene's
geography of love and dirt,
trees ripe with darkness
and bones' white luster.
In the moonlit blue house,
where snow won't fall
unless called upon,
grace enters as requested,
lands next to you, grasped,
as if love were a reflex
simple as weather.
...

A film is always like a book and not like a conversation.
— Christian Metz
As I saw your face nearing
my face, snow fell through
a keyhole and opened the door.
We went inside and watched
windows wax green and gold.
Spring, we decided, was more
oppressive than winter with
its alyssum and clover
and the sheer weight of life
crowding us off the page.
We stayed in bed for years
and took our cures patiently
from each other's cups.
We read Bleak House and
stored our money in socks.
Nothing opened as we did.
...

Even as an embryo, she made room for "the other guy." Slick and
bloody, she emerged quietly: Why spoil the doctor's best moment?
When Dad ran over her tricycle, she smiled, and when Mom drowned
her kittens, she curtsied, a Swiss statuette. Her teachers liked the way
she sat at her desk, composed as yesterday's news. In high school she
decorated her locker with heart-shaped doilies and only went so far, a
cartoon kiss at the door. She read the classics, The Glamorous Dolly
Madison, and dreamed of marrying the boy in the choir whose voice
never changed. Wedding photos reveal a waterfall where her face
should be. Her husband admired how she bound her feet to buff the
linoleum. When she got old, she remembered to say pardon to the
children she no longer recognized, smiling sons and daughters who sat
at her bedside watching her fade to a wink.
...

a voice speaks

to rheumy stars

deadpan witness

no call and response

or supplicant's hope

all this hurts

the ocean suggests

as if waves

could privilege

ear's dumb gestures

or a ghost

of a sentence learn

to read its

own dried ink
...

if loved- could change the weather, could send- if loved- aspen through rooftops and make rain, could if loved make shiny petals spin, could if loved, change matter to attention. Plants blink and stars send energy toward the lonely billions, who, if loved, love as no others, love as themselves in patterns of tongue and lips, if loved send roots, send arms, send the tumbling grace of notes, if loved send grasses from brackish water toward salty air, send, if loved, attention, send, if loved the brassy strings of noble firs and the harmonies of roots maintaining ground: if loved, all possible gatherings spring from the eye, the hand, the blessed words of vapor and truth. If loved, the hummingbird asks the flower the hour of closing, not a grief but if loved a testing, a grace note.
...

Under an alphabet of clouds,
earth's sweet breviary.
We launch paper boats
in light beam and shadow.
Skilled at turning, able
as elephants feeling
the cold bones. Fumbling leaves
on their junket to nowhere
have their place
in the story
of days' steady grace.

When you leave,
the grass will cover
my eyes. And under my eyelids,
dark orchids and wild
grapes climbing.
The air will stir in its shroud.
...

Like wasps
stinging the unkind world
where love is stretched
and painted green
the dumb world gleaming
like bells from a tower
in a painting
of a valley, where
a single puff of steam
translates the scene.
Where to travel
on the empty train?


To sonify a spinoff,
to spin a pearl
until its oyster closes
on resistance, until
its rock finds a ready
landing in dark water,
submerging to a place
beyond eyes and the soft
underpinning of words.

In spring you want more,
the pale leaf's beckoning,
the heart's easy notice,
sky and belief
paint a notion.
The crisp, unseeming world
readies for the task.
Tell it something
it can believe.
...