VIEW FROM THE TOP
From here, the garden:
four stiff stalks of kale,
black leaves folded frozen.
Snow halfway up the rabbit fence.
The old wooden gate to the compost,
center brace broken,
its screen torn and propped till spring.
Will there be spring?
Two spiral stakes mark volunteer
asparagus, one marks the long bed
where under snow and straw
the garlic sets its roots.
FINDING TOYS ON THE STREET
Winter Prompt # 28
He’s on the second shelf between
the first doll I made and the bricks
I use as bookends. I suppose
he once was plush with brown velvet
paws. I never knew him plush.
One amber eye is nearly blinded
with the straggle. His joints
are still good. Maybe his mouth
and nose were embroidered
by Mother, who found him
in a trash can in front of Veterans’ Row
when she was pregnant with me
and had no money for toys.
She was learning how to live
with a husband with PTSD,
the farm boy she married—
and Mother all the way from Cleveland—
waking screaming with flashbacks
of the crashing planes, the burning
friends. Later the bear—I named
him Pooh—taught me
about steadfastness and make-believe.
About comfort and the importance
of a second chance.
SOMETHING LEFT BEHIND IN A PLACE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN
Winter Prompt #27
I left two novels.
I left five collections of poems
and scripts for six plays. I left
an article about conodonts
and a treatise on the rights of women.
I left them on that island in Maine—
I can never remember its name—
it was a two hour ferry ride—
where I didn’t live
in a small, low house in a meadow.
Not right on the shore since I couldn’t
afford it, but a short walk to the rocks
where I didn’t sit with my notebook
and my thermos of coffee
early every morning
whenever the weather permitted.
I left a few pottery bowls there, too,
a cello, a field of daffodils,
and in the shallow soil the buried bones
of a couple of dogs I loved.
Oh, and a little lilac bush that didn’t
amount to much because of the wind.
RIPPED PAPER
In memory of Ursula K. Le Guin
Winter Prompt #26
Tear it all up—
old bills and tax returns, bank
statements, stock certificates,
manuals and guarantees.
But don’t stop
there. Tear up all the useless
books: archaic sciences, outdated
histories, smug theologies,
the whole thick body
of masculine pronoun,
life as battle,
possession as the highest good.
SAND
Winter Prompt # 25
Holiday Point, South Hero,
that summer between houses.
Popham Beach in the fog,
the first time I met the sea.
Fred’s Beach, Fourth of July,
hotdogs. Fireworks over the water.
White Strand of the Blasket, inviting,
dangerous, like its mothering land.
Kitty Hawk, where the first flight paths
are measured by stones.
LID OFF A JAR
Winter Prompt #24
Rusted on. The bail jar is full
of round black balls. Plums? How long
have they been here in the dust,
on this webby shelf?
She’s been dead how many years—
the woman whose house this was,
whose name I’ll never know.
A plum tree in the garden,
sheep in the pasture long grown up
to houses and lawns. New houses
not like this crazy one, layers
of wallpaper peeling, wide chestnut
floorboards, the space against the wall
where the kitchen stove used to stand.
THE FIRST TO
Winter Prompt #23
We were always doomed,
we pioneer women, plodding,
we thought, toward a new land
while the residents of the old one
were sliding grumbling into their graves.
The lightless caves
were full of bears,
the forests wild with tigers.
Eagles screamed and fell
from the startling sky.
Nothing was easy.
The young ones have not followed.
How can we blame them?
The roads we made ended,
not in the City of God
but in the broken place we started from.
Some of us are still here
in our Gothic stonepiles,
wrapped in albs and stoles
tending a dying fire.
Some of us look sideways,
step into small houses
with open doors and warm beds,
with gently lighted windows.
We are making bread, sharing wine.
And some of us are climbing peaks
we could not imagine
when we started our long walk.
Our music drifts down
into the cities, shakes the towers,
rings the ancient bells.
CRUST
Winter Prompt #22
I used to study this stuff:
mantle, crust and core.
The mantle and core poetic,
metaphor:
Mantle
the thin dark covering
of protection, something
a goddess might wear,
or a saint.
Core
the golden heat—at least
golden in the texts—
at the center. The wobble,
the weight. But
crust
recalls chicken pox blisters,
chapped lips, skinned knees,
burnt toast on school-day
mornings. Shiftiness,
instablility. Not poetic,
only metaphorical.
A COUNTRY-WESTERN SONG
Winter Prompt #21
Refrain:
He came through the night,
runnin’ all alone.
All he’d had to eat
was a thrown-out chicken bone.
This old cat has seen a lot of years
From the night I saw him first—
A streak of white across the drive,
Just fur and bones, but real alive,
All hunger, fight and thirst.
Refrain
We trapped and took him to the vet
We thought we’d set him free
When he was fixed and had his shots,
But it turned out he liked us lots—
My good old man and me.
Refrain
So now he’s sleeping on the chair
All full of fish and cream.
It goes to show that any stray
Just needs a hand along the way
To realize his dream.
Refrain, fading. . . .
BIVOUAC
Winter Prompt #20
Whenever I look, I see you twice.
The tent in the forest by Texas Falls
and the couch where you go
those nights you can’t sleep.
The rocky lake shore
in the moonlight and wind
and the chair where you doze with the cat.
This double vision is a peculiar
blessing to the old,
living as we do in many places
with so much behind
and so much less ahead.
