M. L. Williams – My Tosca

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024

My Tosca, poems by M. L. Williams.

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My Tosca

Puccini never imagined an alto Okie
kid picked from glee club to sing
Tosca in English, nor the thick pancake
a volunteer makeup artist
sponges backstage roughly
across my cheeks and brow, stabs
a brush at my eyes with scarlet
and white greasepaint, rubs
on thick rounds of rouge,
and goos lipstick blood red
until she smiles at the clown
she’s made of me before moving
on, nor that I spill away in a red
cassock to find my zucchetto
so I can play Battling Tops
until curtain call when we
rush out at the end of Act I
to sing our “Te Deums,”
which we mumble, then
in English loud and clear,
“Go on, do tell!” so the Sacristan
can boast of Napoleon’s defeat
too soon, nor that my father whispers
at the end of Act II, “We need to get
home” so I never see Tosca leap
from the tower, instead watch
in my skirt and cap, lipstick smearing,
this end to the plot: Tosca triumphant
over Scarpia’s bloody corpse,
then penitent with candles
and a cross, then home in time
for Dad’s football scores and beer.

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Lacuna: Grandfather

You have a long face, deep, piercing eyes
in the one photo I have of you,
equal parts Liam Neeson and Mr.
Green Jeans, but I know nothing
about you beyond dates and places
I find online and the fact, unverified,
that you were full-bred Irish,
dead so long when I was old
enough to connect and question,
your family never mentioned you.
I piece you together through my father,
six uncles, two aunts, all dead now,
all so different I can’t find them
in the handsome face softened
by work, a hint of sadness in the eyes
your picture offers up. Your wife
held the family together all the years
I knew her till she died, generous
to her children and grandchildren,
devout Southern Baptist, part
of a big Scottish clan that came
west from Texas. Did she pick up
the family line when you fell,
or were you among the many
she bore up?

When I asked about you,
she said you had a car and owned
a store, that you took her
on her first car ride. I asked her
if she liked it. “Why, Yes!” she sparked,
and that was all, the only time
I saw a flash of lust in her old blue eyes,
and she held it in the silence that followed.

So you had a store and a car you lost,
you fathered ten children,
one who died an infant, you farmed
cotton in Oklahoma and Texas,
you came out west and died.
That’s all I have to lay upon your long
handsome face softened by work,
your deep piercing eyes, their hint
of sadness that may just be mine.

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Ode to Nothing

Not zero, zero
is math’s
everything,
as is the nothing
you answer
when someone
asks what’s wrong,
not the pause
between breathing
in, breathing out,
not the true gift
of white space,
the silence
between notes,
nor the starless
dark meteors
streak with light,
not death,
its churning
mulch of decay
feeding all,
not the word
itself, as things
that are not
fill imaginations
of children, artists,
conspiracy theorists—
no nothing,
the very
word ode
precludes it.

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© M L Williams

M. L. Williams is the author of Game (What Books Press), the chapbook Other Medicines, and coeditor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets. His poetry and prose is published in many journals and anthologies, including Salt, Western Humanities Review, Hubbub, Plume, Miramar, The Journal of Florida Studies, and The Cortland Review. He teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Valdosta State University.