Joan Mazza
Vessels
Crystal and ceramic bowls filled
with lemons and oranges, one avocado
shouting, Now! Hand-painted, Polish
pottery bowls with Romaine leaves
in a bouquet of green inside a pattern
of blue swirls. An inlaid vase
with Capodimonte porcelain blooms.
Yard sale vases sold for fifty cents,
Mason jars overflowing wildflowers.
Teacups, jelly glasses, watering cans,
pots for boiling pasta, Dutch ovens
loaded with cucumbers, zucchini, ripe
tomatoes, red, green, and orange peppers.
Buckets of rainbow chard and samposai.
Let every container be filled with color
and perfect plants at their peak. Let
no stomach go empty. Let every heart
swell with joy like mosses after rain.
Your Notebook Will Never Leave You
I study the notebooks of the famous,
how they thought on paper with drawings,
diagrams, sketches from different views,
how they captured three dimensions
with shadows, labeled the parts. I wish
I could read Leonardo’s mirror script
in Fifteenth Century Italian. I wish
I could learn his quirks of penmanship
and idiom, the slang of the day, wish
to cultivate some of his flamboyant style,
his dogged curiosity to ask questions
and come back to them again and again
in writing to find what was right. I’d like
his patience with observation, the ability
to watch how the wings of dragonflies
on my pond move, the wings of a phoebe
when it catches an insect for its nestlings.
Let me make notes and to-do lists with
my final breath. His last notebook ends
with geometric shapes as he puzzled
over rectangles. These musings fizzle out.
He writes he must stop now
… because the soup is getting cold.
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Poet Lore, Slant, Italian Americana, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.
