April Pacific
How beautiful, the stars
above the empty coast
shining in his mother’s hair.
Red poppies stain
night’s empty coast
beside the dirt road.
Red poppies brush
a white shawl fluttering
in a dirt road
in slow chilly air.
Her white shawl flutters,
her eyes cloud over.
Slow chilly air
stirs the madroñas.
Her eyes cloud over
under Scorpio’s moon.
Nothing stirs but madroñas,
poppies, and stars.
Scorpio’s moon wanders
the scaffolded sky
between poppies and stars,
shining in his mother’s hair.
Scaffolding the sky,
how beautiful, the stars.
© 2018 Katherine Williams
The pantoum comes from 15th-century Malaysia, where it was an improvised, collaborative courtship song. On the eve of the wedding, the groom's musicians serenade the bride with a couplet and her musicians answer back with another couplet. The song repeats lines two and four from the previous verse and continues until closing with lines one and three. Cecilia Woloch’s “Bareback Pantoum” is an energetic recollection of young love that made Best American Poetry.
Repetition makes the pantoum well suited to meditation, to obsessive thought, and the kinds of images, real or imagined, that sear themselves into memory. This pantoum opens quoting the unforgettable elegiac couplet that closes Richard Garcia’s “Mi Mamá, The Playgirl.”
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “April Pacific” in Porter Gulch Review 36, David Dougherty et al., Eds. Aptos, CA: Cabrillo College (2020)
