Sister Roseanne

Sister Roseanne Poems

The Best Poem Of Sister Roseanne

Wervicq

Douai, Messines,
returning now to Marcke living
in the château of the occupied,
playing with the occupant,

Giving the elderly owner a
pretense of power exercised in
kidnapped furniture and
walled-off wings.

Ricky accumulates trophies
in the foyer and
up the stairs, under the desk
of the stenographer discreetly
buttoning her collar.

Nothing to do, so think of Boelcke
and his cloudless philosophy,
cloudy now in mind, the
box matters not but the
man who sits within.

Now the birds prepare without him,
colored tails, two-man symbols,
a personal language with
red cowlings and motor oil.

And now he sees the ginger
jump announcing loss
ever present personal now
with the younger

Baron involved, with the
younger shot at in his
love handles, in his
baby fat,

But he is killer
athlete from youth, a
man who does not sit,
so Richtofen's among them,

Avoiding the mud-
holes and the rainruts
of the ad-hoc field,

Up observing
usual English
immodesty, filling with
disdain until

In a luck of inexperience,
gunner pierces glass,
grazes scalp,
up

Until the headrush of brain
damage led the Albatros into
wire thickets, onto
barbed briars and
the battle line.

*

A luxury garden, French
symmetry far from
Tiergarten, thinks

Manfred on
hospitable grounds,
surrounded with stout walls and
slim paths and the
paralyzing shyness

of von Richthofen.

Notwithstanding the
equality of affect: grief,
a sense of tragedy, the
sexual self, as

Wellsprings of diversion,
a tender cloistering came
with the nurse, a concomitance,
the delaying of clouds.

Perhaps not asking
the question which could wound:
Whether hers was a town,
presently occupied—

And then there was the
view of the private as he
ordered her, orderly—
to fetch a glass of water.

When Richtofen heard the
other patients talking
he wanted to cry.

Do not tell stories of
me in bloodlust, in
feral dive.
There is a gentle in
me as well.


*

Now Haig's assault is
drowning in a mudbath,
and Richtofen, recovered,
takes to the horizon of widowing,

scolds himself for
prior deludings and in
Flanders, Ypres, in a
leather

Helmet above
a brown ocean of
army, over

Head full of questioned
self-determinance,
a renewed argument
for the role of chance,

the possibility of death
delivered not by
the better but by an
undeserving fortunate in

Random spray,
in scope failure, which was
not the case with the
hunting of his youth.

Sister Roseanne Comments