Tuesday Poem: originally published by The Syracuse Record in 2003

 

Milkweed Lyric

Here

in this moon

scape snow-lit

night, our bed is

a pod, perched at the

end of a dry grizzled

stalk, heaved by the

wind this way and that.

Here, on the Milky Way’s

shoulder, we curl, snug little

seeds, taking fugitive rest

in a feathery but ephemeral

nest,  tucked in so well

we’re unable to see

what might be out

there waiting, or

where we’ll

be planted

next.

Tuesday Poem: originally published by Lake Effect Magazine in 1987

Hermit In Winter

To live without words,

to be muffled thump of axe,

hiss of snowshoe floating over hillsides.

At night the forest air is black ice, so you have to 

be a furnace, fueling, always fueling, warming each 

sub-zero gasp with your mouth and leathery lungs.

To wear wolf near your face,

go deep as an old trout,

growl out bear songs at dusk.

When you let a breath go, it haloes around you, 

gray as the gloom overhead, and when work is done 

there's burrowing into the hut's blood warmth, 

its door flaps: valves thudding shut.

To squat among the drifts, wailing with the wind,

to call your own cadence of days,

choose shadow over light.

At night, winter never 

stops beating,

and you are its heart.

Tuesday Poem: previously appeared in The Syracuse Record in 2003

Ode to the Moon Snail

Unlikely predator!

In that gleaming whorled shell,

its spiraled white 

setting tide pools alight,

agleam. O dance.

O trance of hungry 

chalky nebula!

O languorous taster,

with full and flexible 
tongue extended 
in a sensual 

narrowing gyre.

O unsuspecting quahog

stuck in sea bed mire!

What salty tide is this 

that turns seduction fierce 

enough to mount and pierce 

such horny shell ?

How does such glistening 

undulant meat

harden into drill bit ?

Purity of clammy 
darkness, suddenly 
inhabited by two.

What's a clam to do?

Ravished by the moon itself.

O secret wooings!

Delicious liquefaction!

Tuesday Poem: another one previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2009

A Black Plastic Bag Is Rising

on the wind, like a raven

riding an updraft,

a wingless bird

without hope

of ever gliding

its way back down.

It billows and swells,

now round as a fist

raised at the heavens,

then thinly, it twists

and changes shape,

becomes a moth unfurling

from the chrysalis.

And this makes me ponder

the dark smudge of the soul

as it leaves the body,

released all at once from gravity.

But this is the opposite of a soul --

a polymer stretched and shaped

for single use, and then turned into refuse,

bearing our fingerprints into the world,

our carrying urge made

manifest, run amok,

an indestructible

piece of flotsam.

They’re everywhere.

I look out my window,

and see a land-locked jellyfish

wending its way through the city,

harpy, black spot, blight,

omen, burning tire, bit of midnight,

flake of ash from a funeral pyre.

One of millions.

And where, oh where will it light?

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2009

First The Heart Goes 

Then the head.
The way it was  
with the ruffed grouse

you found in the backyard,

knocked out of the sky,

windfall for some night hawk.

And Nana too --

caught mid-flight

by too much loss and sorrow.

Of course, you bent to study it,
poor thing, filled, as you are, 
with reverence for beauty 
that never lets you 
close enough 
to see more than 
a quiver and blur.

Wasn’t she like that too --

quicksilver;  couldn’t sit still?

Overnight its chest came up empty,

hollow and dry as a cave;

the tribe that once lived there

fleeing, feathers left blowing.

Her heart, torn apart early on: 
a piece for each of her husbands,

the rest shredded the day your mother died.

How she wept, and asked God,
why hadn't he taken her first?

When they said she couldn't
drive any more, she told you she 

felt cavernous as an empty house.

And just one more day

for the body to abruptly

stop at the neck, mindless

as you were, lured by the long 
tail feathers, the golden ruffs,

bending over this bloodless thing

to pull them out. How easily 
the body lets them go.

In the tiny senior citizen’s 

apartment, she began to pace

and couldn’t stop crying,

burned her dinners,  forgot

how to take her pills.

Listen to you: making crow sounds,

as you spread desire’s shadow

across these relics of a 
radiance you yearn for.

Until you've taken
all you can, fetching
shovel and rake to

bring the leavings back

to the clean-up crew

in the woods.

So little left, by the time she died

in the nursing home. Just the scalloped

gold wedding band, that fits on

the end of your pinky,

and a little pile of pictures,

you keep in a drawer by your bed.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in the anthology, Paterson: A Poet's City, in 2005

                                                Dialogue, 2011 by Liliana Porter

Paterson, New Jersey: The Girls 

On Cedar and Summer Streets

had names like songs,

like arias in fact,

that rose and fell

in handfuls of confetti

across the sun.

Santa and Rosa,

tucked like a holy picture inside your missal,

Teresa, Angela, Gracia,

church bell glitter falling

like the angels as they sing us into evening,

Sylvia, Stella, Maria

gleaming in moonlight.

Immaculata Concepcione! 

Palmyra! Preciosa!

Like hymns the mother’s voices

rang down the sidewalk

and girls we called Connie and Pam and Sina

dropped the end of the jump rope

and became a soft percussion of steps,

a murmur of acquiescence,

the creak of a screen door.

Christiana who got to watch the nuns eat in the convent

because her mother cooked for them,

Carmella carrying altar lace,

Caterina celestial in her wedding cake Sunday dresses,

Cosmina and Mariana graceful as boats adrift at sea.

All of them except me.

Ei -----leen !

My mother bellowed,

with an emphasis on the “eye”,

her voice at full tilt,

rain-lashed and battered

as the Irish cliffs in a storm,

smoky as their pubs every night of the week.

The street went silent all of a sudden,

As the girls I turned my back on made the sign of the cross,

and I took the longest way home I could.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by lingerings in 1999

Cheap

You find your grandmother

sitting on the dusty antique shop shelf,

in a golden glazed rough-edged mixing bowl,

the kind they used to sell in the hardware
stores for cheap, so no one, back then,
paid them any mind, functional as they were,
in a kitchen like hers, where you made
what you could from scratch.

You are moved to pick the bowl up,
your fingers reading the low relief
on its sides, a house and garden:
as far from the tenement she lived in,
as you are now, from the calloused 

grip of her hand on your little arm.

You think maybe you’ll rescue it

from this place's clutter and chaos,

but then you look at the price,

and picture her tsking

and shaking her head.

Too dear, she would have said,

and you agree, putting it 

back on the shelf,

taking what’s free instead.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Icarus Rising in 2001

painting by Sally Noble

Crow Woman

sits up black as humid earth,

rises out of a wallow of water

and humus, black and stake-burnt

for harboring knowledge,

for power enough say no,

witch woman, cinder saint,

shakes a tail feather loose

and delivers a baby,

footprints filling with ooze

in her wake, as she struts her

reek of passion, muck of sexuality,

stubborn blood that will not come out,

crow woman, shaven headed

intimate of trees and tinctures,

tarred and feathered adultress,

sticky baby you can’t let go of,

nodding earthward, flying, flying,

landing you in the brambles,

earth angel, flying the highways

commuting, commuting

the sentence, the sentence of night,

and you, and you with your sharp

crow eating night kill eyes,

dare you to follow,

dare you to try

to get rid of her.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.   

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality, ed. Marilyn Sewell 1987

Image from Apron Stringz blog by Calamity Jane

domestic poem

Nightfall I sink

into dishwash meditation :

steaming china prayer wheels

crystalline bells of a lost horizon

breathing slows

din and lull of running water from crockery mandalas

moist heat muscles soften

zen poems drip from silverware

air hums out a chanting

cleansing melody

washing the frantic stew of a day

down the drain along with the suds

those transient rainbow things

thin skin of the passing instant.