Three Poems by Jane Zwart

The Braid

A woman and her doppelganger do not undress
the same, but watching either braid her hair,

you can guess at the other’s striptease. My cousin
says once he kissed a girl because her twin,

no mirror, hands behind her head, wove a French
rope down her back that he could hardly tell

from music, and sure thing, the plainer sister changed
into a goddess every time she unbuttoned

a blouse; nevermind her rigid fishtail plait, my cousin says,
she could slip from a slip fit to make a man cry.

Ode to Shovels

I know you expect
the sexton’s shovel. Me too, me too:
there are so few verses

without one stashed
in the shed or sunk up to its step
somewhere. So few—

and not, I guess, this ode, though
I had hoped
to go straight to praise

you, garden trowel
that does not rasp; that weeds’ roots,
thicker than hairs,

thinner than carrots, can snare;
and you, yellow scoop—
short-handled, plastic—the tool

my sons choose to toss
the beach from the moats they sculpt
without a thought

for death. Blade my dad pushed
through the snow
before he knew a single thing

bitterer than the coffee
the janitor who paid him brewed,
I meant this poem

for you. O, shovel never meant
for trenching, shovel
that never spilled dirt on boxes’ lids.

Morbid Children

Some are born morbid.
Some, as soon as they know a flower
for a flower, know what browning
means. The most precocious

see the baby’s breath waste
in the vase and make the leap:
that will also happen to me.

But morbid children, mainly,
are made, and not by duck’s eggs
swatted from the nest and sucked
a little less than clean, not
by sci-fi violence. A child

can grieve the death of a dog
without grasping the rampant
condition of life, that it ends.

For my brother it was E.T.’s ribs,
his nightlight heart. For me
it was my brother’s baldness
adding wattage to his eyes.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Review, as well as other journals and magazines.