A Woman Under the Surface

From A Woman Under the Surface:

MOON AND EARTH



Alicia Ostriker



Of one substance, of one

Matter, they have cruelly

Broken apart. They never will touch



Each other again. The shining

Lovelier and younger

Turns away, a pitiful girl.



She is completely naked

And it hurts. The larger

Motherly one, breathlessly luminous



Emerald, and blue, and white

Traveling mists, suffers

Birth and death, birth



and death, and the shock

Of internal heat killed by external cold.

They are dancing through that blackness.



They press as if

To come closer. "Ostriker's poems illuminate the places where myth and daily life converge. . . . [She] writes with much intelligence, in a language characterized by the clarity of its images and the precision of its rhythms." "Cool, cerebral, studied. Passionate, visceral, immediate. Can the same poet write both kinds of poems? . . . Alicia Ostriker is not only writing both kinds of poems-she also is fashioning poems that are cold and fiery at the same time."