Elegy
We used to watch
the place where your mouth
would be, now a bird
And your body
that thin vegetable
beckoning from the place
it didn't have to be, now a tree
And the watch from New Mexico
with silver flowers
now a table set for grass
But the eyes in deep music
still speak their power
now a love-note, now one small word
Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, a native New Yorker, taught creative writing, Classical Literature, World Mythology, and founded a Myth/Folklore Studies Center at IUP. She co-edited the prize-winning Life on the Line, and is the author of Going to Bed Whole, Tottering Palaces, The Approximate Message, and In the Fall of a Sparrow, a chapbook commissioned by the Pennsylvania Governor's Institute for the Humanities. She has read her poems in Ireland, Greece, Mexico, Israel, Spain, and Bratislava and has collaborated on 20 pieces with composers and other artists. Her work has been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She as received grants from the National Endowment and the Witter Bynner Foundations and was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts at IUP. Most recently, the collaborative piece, "Furoshiki" (languages that speak without words at the center) premiered in Philadelphia. Facilitator of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, she was brought to England to be a featured writer on the BBC's "Writer from Abroad" series. In 2012 Tebot Bach published her latest book of poems, I Want to Thank My Eyes.