Category: Poem
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Break the walls
The outdoors with its careless wings and scavenging feet invades through the brick and wood and breathing spaces of my July home. Hidden passageways open their secret doors: grasses, crumbs, and damp dark spaces compel the frontier crossers, oblivious to my imagined boundaries. Sheep come through the rail fence spiders…
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The Farm RR1
Look at the earth stacked beneath us. Did you forget how solidly we are supported, how much sun and sky, how much rain and rock and sharp collisions of matter have shaped this planet so that we, with our farms and wishes, can perch on fertile ground and send our…
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Sorted Those
Went through the clothes draped over the chair, you know, the in-between, the ones you’re not sure if you should wear one more time – the not worthy to be hung as clean, the not dirty enough to be tossed in the laundry. Went through the letters saved in the…
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Shield your joyous ones
Storm clouds carry faces so real I swear they speak: be wary do not squander fine days remember happiness You do not know the weather’s humours. Their mouths twist to laughter, then they are dogs, curling away after their own tails until howling and roiling, back they come, forcing me…
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In the drowsy bee-time
In the drowsy bee-time after lunch, three of us dozing under the slow fan: you, in my lap, and you, in the basket – and my love spread over both like a gossamer blanket, tucking you around with soft breaths and the ease of honeyed dreams.
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The cardinal announces
His bright voice swoops through bare branches, spreads across the grass, Woosh, and he sits on the wood fence head bold as a warning throat an unquenchable fire wings like an ambush Zooming across the garden to his brown-and-rose mate at the top of the stark old maple he proclaims…
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The Garden, Uncovered
When the cardinal called out – his song like drops of light spilling over a dawn field – I ran outside that first day of his voice as Spring’s soft sun opened the heart of the brisk, grey winds I ran to answer him then stopped astonished at the tender,…
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and wakes in April
All winter the lawn has loafed under its thick white quilt and wakes in April, tousle-headed, crusty-edged, and with the freshest shoots of weeds curled cheekily in its damp, bare places. Afternoon sun, a stiff rake, and the layabout sits, chastened, scrubbed and alert: waiting to don a new green…
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The Travelling Onion
To the Muses, with love, 2005 “And I would never scold the onion for causing tears.”* The onion does what it does. We each must live this way. The small tears you have caused me the days of laughter they are of my own making yet they are yours; you…
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