Collision

Traffic is stopped on Old Shelter Rock Road,
Where usually there is no traffic.The minivan

Couldn't have been doing more than thirty,
But the motorcycle, crushed and grounded,
Gleams dully on the street.

Someone has covered the rider's face with a shirt.
He's laying on his back across the yellow lines,
Knees up like he's reading, or watching
Clouds go by.

photograph by Kou Hattori

In Spring

Everyone’s cold. To-do list
stretches miles and I won’t
get out of bed. Email from a sane man
screams I AM AFRAID
YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN ME
and I’m dropping small tears
on your shirt but you’re
not in it. Kids outside
are doing what they’re supposed to,
screaming, pushing, falling down,
and I see your frown in a photo
and it’s frostbite on my bones.

You’re gone. Can’t feel
my feet, but lavender fingers ache.
Grief counselors preach acceptance:
You aren’t coming back.

I say, take me, wakening earth,
take what’s left of this frozen stone.
Close that wound up. Let spring begin.


photograph by Allie Taylor

The Clock of Birds

"The Kaluli people use birds as a clock and a calendar. Bird calls wake them in the morning, and afternoon calls tell the people when it is time to gather for a meal. Planting and harvesting are started when particular birds are heard singing in the forest."

-from Rain Forests of the World


Then why shouldn't I
do the same? They have
their forest of souls, their songs
to lift the spirit, but I
have a field guide, and screens
in all the windows. It will
take time to learn the hours:
the mourning dove at seven,
and I don't know what that is
just after sunset. But should
I succeed, I will know my own home
better than any. I will sleep
when the owls instruct me.
But swallows and orioles can't
keep me here. In this old world
I am too young, and my lease
is nearly up. In three months,
new windows, new birdsong,
new hours.





more on the Kaluli relationship with birds here.
photograph by Sandra.

The Language of Flowers: Lily of the Valley

sweetness, humility, healing, spring, a return to happiness

I sleep late. The lawnmowers
do not wake me, nor the landlord's
angry wife. The light
finds my eyes gently,
as the rain begins. The house
is empty. The bright street,
deserted. The comforter
has been rejected, a cool white dog
at the foot of the bed.

All the clocks are wrong or gone,
I guess he took his with him. I force open
a window. It is time to start the day.





painting by Cassandra Barney
another season of floriography begins.

My House is Falling Apart

Somewhere the sun has risen.
The kitchen sky sags with rain
and the things she is not saying.
She steps into the living room
just as the ceiling collapses.







photograph by Laurence Philomene

Windy Afternoon

Each gust brings
one leaf, the remains
of desiccated vines.

Old nests blow by,
coming undone
just as they were built,
in pieces.




photograph by flickr user chaque-jour

A Connecticut Christmas

They are graduates all
of the Saint Michael's choirs,
these Cooks and Waterhouses
and Smiths. The carols
swing fast from timid waking -
a musical slumber
these twelve thick months - to Baroque
descants, four-part harmony.
Behind a man I have just met
I am propped on the bathroom door.

This is the year's one day
the glossy piano knows contact.
Dessert has been laid
on the gleaming buffet,
but the choir soldiers on.
Once in a while a neighbor
mouths, "Come, sing," to me
from a rosy couch. "Come, sing."
The voices are careless, sincere.

Weary husbands rock
on the balls of their feet, arms full
of fur coats. Their wives are full too.
The first glass to remember,
the second pretending, the third
to soak up the mess of the others.
I have climbed the stairs
for my notebook. Down in the library
a young tenor has won
the piano bench. The notes

float up, not Christmas at all,
but Journey. The tenor downstairs
looks for me and my flushed cheeks
at the borders,
and I am not there.



photograph by the indomitable Rachel K

Our Father in Heaven

We told the baby that Queenie was with you.
His head was too large, his knees unsteady,
But you must have seen him curl carefully
In her corner of the yard.

We called him in. He would not budge.
He did not know who you were
Or when you would return, but
Til her black body took his place in the dust
He was going nowhere.

Four years went by. The baby grew
Into his head, gray eyes flashing
With unstoppable laughter. He was so young
When she died he cannot pronounce
Her name. Yours he knows,
But does not mention.

You Can't Be a Ghost, I Never Proved You Were Alive

Jesus, James. Twice in one week, sunset
has found me driving past the bookstore.
It is nowhere near where I live now,
but from time to time I need a smiling face,
a wave from the cash register.

Two times, James, two times. You
do not believe in coincidence and
your paranoia is contagious. Those trees
--manicured saplings in winter coats
of white sparks--

awaken as I watch. The light
is red at the corner of the parking lot.
I have the dreary length of this shuffling traffic
to shake my head and stare, to say,
Jesus, James, why now?

Wish You Were Here

'Here' is this overpriced coffee shop,
where the pumpkin-apple soup is better
than expected. Here I look
out the gray window and want to tell you things.
The trio of gruff men exchanging embraces
before climbing into their trucks. The green
fire hydrant in the middle of the sidewalk,
raised rusting letters spelling out AMERICAN DARLING.

The way the steam swirls upward
into my cold nostrils. You would track it there,
and, laughing, poke my cheek.
At the horizon, how bare branches sweep the sky
like wire brushes. The dear little white church
and its disjointed Gothic roof, parapets pointed
like punishments, visible only to God, and us,
if you were here.

House Sitting, Mid-July

My vision swims.
Is this, then, what madness is--doing things
without knowing the reason why? I am waist-
deep in the swimming pool,
half-stiff in my work clothes. The hem of my blouse
darkens with chlorine. Behind me the little black dog watches,
concerned, looking for someone
to notify.

The heaviest lavender buds have fallen to the bricks
on the patio, but the bees in their lustful quest
pass them up.
The sodden bodies of impatiens bob by.
There are no mosquitoes.
In this unknowing moment I am sure
my blood has the same heat
as the sunset air, the bathwater-warm clear water,
the soft eternity.

Outside the Mall After the Rain

They are roses. Just roses,
perfect pink like young love. But
in this moment they are everything:
irises. Daisies. Orchids. Even
cherry blossoms are eclipsed
in the tenderness of this vision.
I want to swallow them, to wash my face
with the glittering petals, to stare until
they are as much me as my name
or my dislike of roses.

Valentines

The library did not have the book I needed.
“I’d better mark it missing,” said the limping man,
returning with me
to the reference desk. “It hasn’t been seen
in seven years.”

The radio news is noise in the car. I wonder
where my book is living, on whose
dusty shelf, if the thief even knows she has
what should be mine.

I park across the street from my house, still
muttering about the wasted trip.
The man on the radio strikes a sudden somber tone.
“The Air Force says now that all four men aboard
a bomber that exploded
over Qatar today”
—he pauses—
“are safely on the ground.” I exhale,
having held my breath for these
invisible soldiers,
the men I did not know existed.

On my way out of the library
I passed a Poetry Month table, the volumes
tipped on one end to showcase their slenderness.
The pages flipped fast
and my answers were not inside.
Lying flat on one end of the display,
an afterthought, a push
of a bored finger, Ted Kooser’s Valentines.
I bring it home.

In front of my neighbor’s house I pull
the Kooser from the car and slam the door.
The street is silent and I realize
the imaginary bomber passengers landed safely—
landed safely, only to return
to the incessant emergency
of war.
I realize that even as the NPR man informed me
of my own relief
they rose from their stretchers
and prepared to die all over again.

The library book, glassy in its plastic jacket,
Slips from my fingers
and lands on the wet road.
In that deafened moment my eyes know only
Black street, white book,
red heart.

H(a)unting

She took the long way home.
As she crested a hill she saw it:
The cloud-murked moon, color of the setting city sun,
seated on the horizon like a broken bowl.

She doubted her eyes and drove on,
winding through streets of darkened houses,
peering down driveways, crawling past the bars and jewelers downtown.

It caught her around the corner of a bakery.
The sight of it squeezed her heart and took fistfuls
of her lungs,
and she drove on, eyes wide, mind still.

untitled

The shadows of the deer flew
across the Post Road
just beyond the reach of my headlights,
hunched like fugitives.
There is a darkness, they told me
as they wandered into the trailer park,
that you cannot control, a drumbeat
you can neither silence
nor ignore.

December 2

She woke in the silence, knowing the sound of snow.
Outside the kitchen window a stag, new antlers,
stood on hind legs to reach the frozen berries of the tree near the road.
She washed the coffee pot, her eyes locked on his hooves,
the trail of tiny prints he left on the lawn.

Her heard her watching and turned from the tree,
caught her dead in the eye through the glass and the snow.