The neighbor's wife

Orson Scott Card once said: "I sat in a conversation with a screenwriting professor discussing English majors screenplays. He told me 'They come to class with long plays full of pretty language with lots of feelings and symbols in which nothing happens. They need to understand that films require stories.
'That other stuff is for poems'"

I disagree.
A good story is like an old shoe. It feels nice to listen to it now and then and kick it around.
Poems should be the same. Remember that feeling you got when you first heard "Richard Cory"?
This one did the same to me.
Please read it twice

The neighbor's wife
-by Susan Palwick

It sprouts wings every few weeks
but as yet has flown no further
then the woodpile in the yard
where we found it six months ago.

Colin Wilcox thought it was his wife
returned as a angel. It still wore
its headset then, lying trapped
in a crushed metal basket; Colin freed it,

muttering something about harps and haloes,
and the rest of us stayed quiet. Colin carried it
into the house and for three weeks nursed it
in his bed, on the side unwarmed since Marella,

the old Marella, had her heart attack.
When it could walk on six legs Colin taught
it to fry bacon, weed the garden, milk
the goats, which cower at its touch.

"Reminding her what she forgot in Heaven,"
he tells us, but she has not remembered speech,
this new Marella who is purple and croaks
like bullfrogs on the hottest summer nights,

who surely came from somewhere, if not God.
Lately it uses those stubby wings to carry
the heaviest logs from the woodpile. For Colin's sake
no one has tried to frighten it away.




That feeling of self-induced insanity. Of forbearance and long-suffering beyond explanation, with the only justification: habitation in proximity.
Of the simple and true fact: Beyond the five senses THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING UNDERNEATH!
If I never write anything that makes you feel fuzzy, I should walk on unconcerned. If I never write anything that makes you stop and think, I am not a writer, but a verbal masseuse.