4X2
an online poetry journal
Coup de Foudre
by Miranda Beeson
Did you lose your keys? I say
Rolling down my car window
On a wild windy mid-June day
By the bay. White caps, the bridge
& you. Talk about cinematic.
Why do you look just like John
Slattery in Mad Men? All cropped
White hair & vigor? Can I say—
You are life force made flesh?
Your stunned expression stuns
Me right back. A woman drives
By & rectifies the wreckage of
Your day. What are the odds?
(Your black credit card too...)
I say I knew it was you, not
Knowing why, but knowing
I knew. The magnetic field of
Feeling—the absence of thought.
I found them washed up on
The beach. Down there. Where
I live. Follow me. And you do.
A strange intimacy—watching
Happiness fracture the face of
A man you just met. Its naked
Beauty. I hand you your keys
& card—keys worn & warm,
Card sleek & hard. We are palm
To palm. Pull me through the
Words of the world where words
Matter. Sever the slice of late
Afternoon sun that falls between
Us. Let me slip out of my skin.
Slip into yours.
The Smith's Tale
by Miranda Beeson
In the low shadowed corner
of my mid-winter 3 a.m. room
stands a sad hulk of a man
hump-shouldered & silent.
His stiff sooty clothes
layered like shingles on
the house of his soul. The
blacksmith’s apprentice—
his molten days flowing
one through the next in
a succession of horse shoes
& hitching posts, hammers
& tongs. A solitary spirit who
has refused to leave this 18th
C. smithy, currently the house
of my 21st century friends.
I have had such visitations
before. Fright does not factor
in, only a palpable curiosity—
why a weight won’t lift.
You have seen it, I’m sure.
The last fierce struggle
followed by an ascension
—the relief in the room—
a body turning the color
of clay, the eyes dim pools—
but such a lift, shift in the air—
like a longed-for breeze.
He regards me, hooded brow,
black eyes, this neanderthal,
all spite and sorrow—a plea
for help made flesh.
Blacksmith heal thyself
I say. I am busy carrying
my own weights, measuring
out my own molten days.
Either hammer the iron
or lie flat on the anvil, waiting
to be struck. Smite those
chains—link by link.
Poet's Statement: The blacksmith in “The Smith’s Tale” was as described in the poem: a visitation (not a dream) in the corner of my bedroom in an 18th century house that belongs to friends of mine in Leverett, Massachusetts. Their house was indeed a smithy way back when. The poem arrived ten years after the event, while I was pondering why some spirits seem to let go of this life with such ease, and others remain so stubborn—refusing to let go. (I never slept in that bedroom again.)
We go through periods of our lives where visceral desire is unknown to us—then, when least expected, we find ourselves in its presence again. "Coup de Foudre" was such a moment. I am reminded of the lines from Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Touch Me:” “What makes the engine go? / Desire, desire, desire. / The longing for the dance / stirs in the buried life.”
Bio: Miranda Beeson is the recipient of the 2017 Jody Donohue Poetry Prize. New poems can be found in The Southampton Review, The Laurel Review and Badlands. Her chapbook Ode to the Unexpected is available from Shrinking Violet Press. She has been awarded several New York State Council on the Arts Grants for teaching a generation of young poets. Currently happily at work on a manuscript of poems, WILDLIFE, she is an MFA candidate at Stony Brook Southampton.