Read here by Lori-Nan Engler the actress, (a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) whose films include 'Head Office' and 'Mother May I'   Lori-Nan also performed a principal role in the soap opera 'The Doctors'. Recently she has worked in regional theater in the Philadelphia area and written and published some poetry and fiction in Hopeful Monster and Northeast Corridor. She was also a collaborator on the identity papers CD produced by Drimala Records in 2002. Lori-Nan has a son and three daughters.



before the words if only—
before the world of could be—

there the long sun-beaten grasses
drew us far into the fields
you reached out for my hair
and I was already smiling,
turning partly teasing you with
your weaknesses running away but not far

you drew my hair
in dozens of sketches
so many erasures
so much charcoal
stained your soft fingers
till you could trace each curve and angle
each hollow and rise
where you made the light hold me
the grass sheltering us like a cradle—

someday there could be
a well for us to draw upon
where we could see ourselves held still
as if the water could bear our images
while all we want
disturbs them—

the world sands through
my fingers
pouring

my body sands away

who throngs my hiddenness
my drivenness—

when my lips in your neck sink
and you vibrate deeper in
holding me harder than I can stand
we say nothing will say nothing will forget
will never say it
when you rub against me
accidents open

my hope my loss
knowing how it is

mystery repeats itself
to those who remember

so i must forget
and reap it anyway

what if this world is what we are afraid it is?

now these off-white skies grow hard—
winter in the fields of swamp grass
bows the brown and umber blades
flashing yellow-green like corn silk
but sharper shrill

unlike that black-glass flow
so utterly still
it once mirrored dusk’s slow coming
while the slightest wing
bent the spreading tops of seeding grasses
their stalks more tall than our bodies
could ever be

even if we walked across the if
that strands between us

and the if that is us

the tawny grass tips
brush away the sky
and we are the shadow
in a wave rolling so purely
the eye aches at its beauty

the charred sky behind the rainbow
that is
so in the iris’ blues
so in a flame

© 2007   Jeffrey Ethan Lee


Listen to "Iris' Blues for her Painter"

(read by Lori-Nan Engler)
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Jeffrey Ethan Lee's poem - 'Iris' Blues for her Painter'
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Author's biography:
In 2002 Jeffrey Ethan Lee won the Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook prize for ‘The Sylf ‘, and he created ‘Identity Papers’, a full-length dramatic poem with music on CD, which was nominated for a 2002 Grammy.

Lee has also published ‘Strangers in a Homeland’ (chapbook with Ashland Press, 2001), and poems, stories and essays in North American Review, Many Mountains Moving, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Crosscurrents, Drexel Online Journal, Green Mountain Review, Washington Square and others.

Lee became one of the directors and editors at Many Mountains Moving Press without meaning to when most of the staff resigned between 2005 and 2006. His son Ethan James Lucas Lee was born in 2003.

‘Identity Papers’ was published in 2006 by Ghost Road Press (http://identitypapers.org/). Lee’s first full-length poetry book, ‘Invisible Sister’ was published by Many Mountains Moving Press in 2004.