Lisa Low: “Letter to Kath”
LETTER TO KATH
Thanks for the pictures, Kath, but you must
admit, we don’t look great. We look old
and gray. As faded as yesterday’s newspapers,
especially beside gorgeous Flora, prancing
through the park in her pink patent leathers.
It’s pouring rain here today. The soil’s soaked;
the pavement’s wet and black. The sewers are
choked with white paper napkins that bubble
as they go down. But why should that, why
should anything, make us suffer? Tomorrow,
no doubt, it will be sunnier. Out of a pink
sky smeared with clouds, the sun will pour
casks of hot light down. The grass will be
greener than we ever remember seeing. The
forsythia will drip its bright yellow, cut-glass
spears, and far away, on your bright green lawn,
you will be out painting landscapes with Flora!
Lisa Low’s poetry, reviews, interviews, and academic essays have appeared in Massachusetts Review, The Broken Plate, BoomerLitMag, Boston Review, Crack the Spine, Cross Currents, Delmarva Review, Evening Street Press, The Boston Herald, Litbreak Magazine, Phoebe, The Portland Press Herald, Potomac Review, Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, Tusculum Review, The Virginia Normal, and Aphros Literary Magazine, among others. She is one of the editors of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. Low spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and Pace University in New York City. In addition to her work as an educator, Low was briefly a film and theatre critic for Christian Science Monitor.