The Poetry of Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Allergic to their stings, you see my words as bees./For all their softness, you see something hidden./They ask for what you can but will not give: a child,/And hidden in the mildness of my flesh you see the threat . . . .”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—April 2020—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of Weekly Hubris, considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition, on Kindle. Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece and America. (Her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande a Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.) Boleman-Herring makes her home in South Carolina (the state Pat Conroy opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum”). She would prefer, she says, to be in Greece, always, but especially in autumn, when the nights are cool and the sea is warm. At 68, Boleman-Herring says: “The poems here were written by a fearless, foolhardy young woman in her early 20s whom I now look back upon fondly—and with a certain sense of wonder.”

Woman Talking Man into Child

Allergic to their stings, you see my words as bees.
For all their softness, you see something hidden.
They ask for what you can but will not give: a child,
And hidden in the mildness of my flesh you see the threat,
The scented promise that will pin and punish.
So—since all this buzzing’s wasted on you, dear,
Look here—the honey.

(Written aboard the ferry to Mykonos, The Naïas, in c. 1975.)

The Pear in The Bottle
(For Marios & Jason Orozco)

How did it get there, the children ask me.
We all have assumed it was force or a trick.
Some sleight of hand put the pear in the bottle.
A pear wouldn’t squeeze through the space in its neck.
 
But the marriage of matter is something I question:
The wine and the pear and the bottle are one.
And the answer, as ever, is nature, is nature,
Twigs trapped in bottles to grow in the sun,
Twigs trapped and sprouting far pears in the sun.

For My Mother, Her Husband a Month Dead

Poinsettias in pots they bring us.
These will live, and so will we,
They say. But we do not
Believe, and yet we do: it’s true
And all so contradictory.
 
What I would say cannot be 
Said or done, accomplished, promised, proven,
And yet is (all these), for he lives on.
He lives, in this, in me,
In last year’s “dead” poinsettia 
Which blooms though botanists insist
Cannot, should not, shall not. It blooms.

Something Missing on the Left
(For Lucy Peterson Orozco)

When you arrange a still life, prune the parts
So colors echo, shapes reverberate,
Leading eyes just where you’d have them go;
Around in circles, toward the corners, in
To reach a point you call the square, the spring
From which all motion comes, all meaning flows.
Arrange it well, Lucero; plan your canvases
Of mandolins and pitchers, orchids, bowls,
And make me see what you would have me see,
Alternatives to what I know around me: life bereft
Of order, something missing on the left.

Note: These short poems, written in the 1970s, are from a collection of the author’s early work, The Crowded Bed: Erotic, Light & Formal Verse, published in Greece by Lycabettus Press.
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.