Three Poems

by Renee Emerson

The Maidservants
Ruth 2:22
Keep with the other girls.
That advice like what an actual mother, not in law,
would tell her daughter.
The women work their own
area of the harvest, herding, moving
as birds sometimes move,
one nebulous shadow being.

Gathered, we are more noticed but less so--
harder to choose one from all
the faces, legs, breasts, hips.

Together, gathered, we forget
the danger. Gossip about this man
or that. Some grow bold, venture from
the other women now and then, to be admired,
to shine like a jewel, in the far ends of the fields.
Farther and farther. Until one comes back, or doesn’t,
taken, tattered, fawn with broken leg.
Those are absorbed to our center, where they beat,
beat hot, in the red-dark
heart of fear that binds us, keeps
us from harm. 


Boaz Watching Ruth in the Fields
She seems to love
the remnants, taking
up what others have
cast aside. Maybe she feels
a kinship with them, herself
cast aside by death,
clinging to her mother-in-law,
another remainder
who has returned to
a family who forgot her.

The steady rows of the harvest
sigh, hushed to the reapers
working their violence.

She came at dawn,
when the air was still
cool in its memory
of the evening. She takes
what they miss and discard.
Hands quick as twin mice.

She isn’t used to this work--
you can tell by the way
she sometimes enjoys it.

The repetition, the long
hours under the slow eye
of the sun, only occasional
human voices, but more
often the rustle of the plants
holding fast to the earth,
singing their only song--
take, take, take, take. 


Threshing Floor
“She rose before one could recognize the other”
I offer no apology
as I step out into
the mouth of the night
which forgives me everything
anyway, a true night, moon
cloaked with the
sodden clouds of
a storm that will
break hours later.

Cat-eyed, I see
the world in contour,
your body muffled
to only the almost
imperceptible breathing,
waves at the shore
of consciousness.

I have always loved
this part of the night,
have always felt it
more personal than
so many times of day.

It asks nothing of me,
and I rest
alone in a lack
of obligation,
feeling separate
from my body, mercifully
blind to the constant
periphery of own hands,
own breasts, own belly.

A pure mind floating
without inhibitions.

So when you rise too,
I move past you
as the hours move
past us in their funereal
march into the indiscriminating
accusations of the sun.