DANA HOLLEY MALONEY

Sign Painter

Near the Métro stop Gare Saint-Lazare, some American girls I knew,

students like me, lived beside their madame in an adjoining apartment

and kept boxed milk outside the window in winter, as Parisians had done

for decades. The three of them cuddled like sisters on single beds

to fend off the cold and crossed the hall at dinner for some casual French

conversation and laughter with the mother and her daughter.

On this same block, the sign painter kept his shop. We watched him

in the window or on the sidewalk when it was warm. Whenever

we went by, he was at work, making words. Meditative and meticulous

in his lines, his articulation of the alphabet, each shape enunciated

with his brushes. While we tried to form more perfect French vowels

with our mouths, our accents fell forever short of his exactitude.

We studied beauty inside the museums and the monuments but learned

the most about a life well lived from him, a man whose métier was his art.

Easter Sunday

Too much the hypocrite for Mass today,

I thought all morning about death and resurrection,

how we stand at the intersection of the two.

In the garden yesterday, I raked away the old growth

to make way for daffodils just starting to rise,

found green around the roots of old annuals

that had survived the winter. I only needed

to cut what had withered. What’s so hard to imagine

then? The old plants, once on the compost heap,

will feed the new year’s growth, will be alive inside

what will return. Oddly, my faith’s intact, even

without walking through the oaken doors of our old

church, where it was dark inside and we passed

as through a garden into another fragrant state.

Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair State University. More at danamaloney.com.  

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