Barbara Stanwyck

You select your own company:
fellow criminals, for instance.
Your hard tender stare
announces you are motherly
and a murderess.
You stay dead like rubber or celluloid
yet live in black-and-white glory
and a throaty voice
deeper than an oboe's chant.
If the dvd store clerk
doesn't know who you are
that highlights his dim-wittedness.
You existed, now you bud
and you will continue to blossom,
Brooklyn lady, transplanted to a big valley.