Tuesday Poem: previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Summer 2008

  Sunflowers

Vincent understood them: the way they yield

their darkling faces to the sun,

aflame for its arcing shimmer dance

across the day’s mysterious expanse,

how big they are, how weighty, over grown,

the way they lean together in the fields,

conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan

as their heads reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.

He gathered them in vases, painted
their petaled fall from grace,

bunched together, shy, askew
and awkward, out of place,

caught their surprise at being indoors,
the droop and shrug of leaves,

the way they suddenly dropped,
losing all of their color.

Too painful to paint them
riotous at the roadside in full bloom:

signs of what we were before
the crows moved in to feed.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry in 1994

What Saved Her

                                     

When they were napping,

she discovered she could

grow feathers at will, so black,

they shone like a mirror, fanning out

as she stretched her wings,

and a beak hard and sharp

as a pencil point, to peck at the glass

that kept her out of the fields she could see,

                                    

and without so much as a look back

at their golden heads damp with dreams,

she was out and flying to the others,

clustered dark and narrow-shouldered

on limbs, on fences, chilling the air with their fury.

   

She could watch herself: claws

tearing at flesh, caws, loud and raucous,

hers and theirs, a chorus of dry stalks,

carrion erasing everything:

the white bones picked

clean and catching light.

                       

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Melusine in Summer of 2009

Moonlight Calving

They say those who begin under 
moonlight, give the richest milk.

A cow lies down in the field when it's her time.

You're summoned out of warm bed

into the damp, the clover underfoot.

The shepherds were drawn by a star,

but here in these rolling fields,

all silvered and shadowed,

you've come because you can't sleep.

There are no choirs singing.

All you hear is the lowing of one in need of relief.

You will be her annunciation, her benediction

as you reach up inside her and pull as hard as you can.

****

But the writer worries.

Who cares that they have to be yanked out?

And it hurts, goddamn it,

that she's full of a rage

she knows no one wants to hear about.

It's messier than she ever could have imagined.

Don't look away in embarrassment, though.

She delivers, she does eventually.

As she cleans it up, you'll see,

the thing will develop a presence.

This tender scaffolding of words

still too wobbly to stand,

curls on the moonlit page

fresh from its difficult birth,

****

For the sake of argument

why not say it is also effortless:

akin to Jell-O setting if Jell-O suddenly set and came alive.

One minute there is moonlight.

Well, we call it light, but really it is nothing

even remotely resembling true light:

the white of sunlight with its hidden waves of color.

This is light reflected from a body curving toward another body.

An ethereal whiteness

slowly solidifies in a field,

comes alive as a newborn calf

bleating for its mother,

and we feel the milk of its yearning,
thrill to its nudge and nuzzle.