Originally published in Poetry Magazine
© 1997 Modern Poetry Association
Used with permission.
(
Even through her cheap boots she felt
something unnamed shift below the earth,
and her skin tingled, a thousand tiny bombs
exploding in on through her fingertips,
belly, hips, the very roots of her scalp.
Even picking mushrooms, she saw the glow
worms and fireflies throb brighter
as she neared. When her mother died,
she gave up her bed to boarders, stoked their last
embers, boiled their pirogi. She tended rich
children, charges that circled her
like a planet's moons. Even gravity stopped
trying to hold her down. Science whispered
in her ear, stirred her, pulled her across every border
to Paris and Pierre. How they pulsed,
huddled together in the lab with a box of radium,
watching rays burst free and split
into alpha, beta, gamma. How they beamed
at the Folies Bergères, all those legs
rising and falling like happy electrons.
Thin, squinting men in top hats heaped prizes
on them. Even when a streetcar's wheels
rumbled by to claim Pierre, Manya pushed on,
an engine doing its work. She rigged x-rays
on vans to see the wounds of war, killed tumors,
burned skin off her fingers. She glowed, she believed
in the triumph of good. Even when her great heart
stopped pumping, needles jumped beyond their scales.
Maria Terrone, a native New Yorker and director of public relations for Hunter College, has published in such magazines as Poetry, Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and Wind, which awarded her poem "In Standard Time" the 1998 Allen Tate Memorial Poetry Prize. She recently completed a full-length manuscript, The Bodies We Were Loaned, and thanks her husband Bill, a physics teacher, for his technical help with "Madame Curie" and her other science-related poems.
