Margot Wizansky

POET & PAINTER

BOOKS

POEMS

Her poem, “From the Beginning,” is on The Missouri Review website.

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Margot read her poem, “Before There Were Women,” on the Cape and Islands Public Radio station.
 

Her poems about baseball, “If the Goddam War Hadn’t Happened,” “It’s Like Baseball,” and “Signs,” appear on the Baseball Bard website.

 

She had a pantoum, “the Boys,” published on Solstice Literary Magazine’s website.
 

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HERE COMES LOVE

                                                                                     

its fragments, its phases,

its four letters settling

simply on the plain,

in a nice font: Baskerville

Old Face or Perpetua,

the “L” standing straight 

like it needs nobody.

“O” curls up, a dog

on its back, stroke me here.

“V”, a balancing act—

if you push, it so easily

collapses, like a certain storm,

the kind you didn’t plan for,

that takes the house, the car,

the willow in the front yard,

the nights you lay

with your head on love’s lap.

Love becomes Lose,

Unstoppable,

like sickness or death,

the last sliver of sun

at the horizon spreading

before you, emptied

of the great miracles

you travel a lifetime to know—

icebergs, meteors. “E”

is always beginning to leave,

back to business,

coat over its shoulder,

one foot out the door.

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TO SWIM WITH DOLPHINS

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She wanted that,

all summer in the hospital,

 

a pod of machines sounding her, 

pumping in, sucking out,

her legs faint ripples in the sheets.

 

She loved to sail 

to the eye of the wind, close-hauled,

taunting the rip-tide,

rolling with any wave who’d have her,

reduced to this puny adventure.

 

I stare at the city turned cadmium orange,

and wish she’d leave like sunset,

incendiary, streaks of fire her wake,

instead.

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TOEHOLD

 

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Every day you make the choice

to live on the slippery ledge,

where you almost always fail

to find a toehold, mesmerized

as you are by the gelid clarity

of water or the far-off blow

of some blue-green radiance,

the steely whistle

of work and money,

the softer mist of love,

everything draws you—

the cold burn seizing

anyone who stands up

in the boat. Paddle through

the irresistible archway.

Take a piece of the iceberg

to chill your cocktail.

It can roll over you.

Virtue will carry you

only so far and help

never comes fast enough.

ABOUT

Margot Wizansky, a poet and painter, does much of her writing in a little cottage by the sea on the south coast of Massachusetts.

 

Her poems have appeared in many journals, such as Poetry East, Lumina, Inkwell, Quarterly West, Potomac Review, American Literary Review, and Spillway. She has edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. In Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, she transcribed the oral history of her friend, Emerson Stamps, born in 1923, a grandson of slaves and son of sharecroppers. Her original poems accompany his story.

PAINTINGS