Tuesday Poem: Announcement

I am pleased to post about my second book here. 

The Girls In Their Iron Shoes was published in 2016 

by Finishing Line Press. 

It's available at their website and on Amazon.com

The Witch Series

Crone Song

My face is a hex                     

made of clouds                       

rapidly passing.

These hands betray,               

and always pay                      

what the cards tell them.

Where is the beak that can peck away at sorrow?

My knees are a jinx

crusted and frozen

over, leaving me

rooted and tree slow.

These feet search

floor after floor          

for the path

that will lead me

to what must be said.

What chain opens up grief’s damper,

so its terrible vapors can fly?

A vestigial tail

at the base of my spine,

wags at the prospect of relief.

My mouth unlocks

in harmony.

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

 

Drawing By Sally Rendel

Old Woman’s Aria

What a boon, what a boon, what a boon!

to live in an empty honey crock tucked into

the long brown bones of a hedge.

O bee hieroglyphics!

O nectar and reverie!

O to row out in half a walnut,

to meet this drowned world,

with its blessings of barter and trade,

its mud that spits out stones for ballast

and jars, those glass beatitudes,

that rise up singing out of the muck,

jars, clear and intact, no matter to me

how small they be, or what they held once,

jars I catch the rain in, the best ones

begging to be filled with potables,

to be sealed with caps I make

out of crayons and candle scraps.

O to be washed sweet again by the rain,

to savor the taste of a memory, though

the poor bees, themselves, are gone!

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: Baryshnikov's Feet

 


Baryshnikov’s Feet

Look up and you see
a green man, a faun, ageless,
graceful as a silver birch,
a delicate fool about to embark
on the first of many Spring journeys.

Look down, and you spy
the feet that twist beneath him,
thick as the roots that anchor an oak,

Atlas feet that could support the world, 
spreading out below rock hard legs,

feet like old women, with cigarettes
hanging from their lips, as they read
Pushkin aloud to an empty room,

heroic feet, old and crazy now,
Baba Yaga’s house dancing
across the forest, each toe
a chicken foot digging in,

feet with rivering veins in them,
muscles big as a lion’s haunches,

feet with the iron grab of an old man
on a bread line, desperate to tell you
a story about hard knocks, solidity,
risk taking, great leaps that bring
painful landings, a man
who puts himself to hard use
in order to lift the rest of us up.

Tuesday Poem: published in Poems of Awakening, an anthology edited by Betsy Small

I Dreamt the Green Hands of the Clock


rolling backwards, merciful in their pull
toward the deep green days of our marriage,
of being luminous as a new shoot in your arms,
the puddle green of your kisses, the green tree-belly
moonlight over our bed, as the damp green
song of peepers frizzled the air, you on your knees
above me, the Spanish moss of your hair swaying
as we rose in the soft growing dance of love,
those greenest moments of our conviction.

How sweet then, to awaken
fresh from a night like this, still beside you,
to stand rubbing our eyes in disbelief
as we look out the window at this fog,
thick and pale hydrangea green,
turning the buildings, everything, alien,
this lightning raging across the city on long white legs,
how sweet to feel as if we were just born yesterday,
the green hands of the clock rolling
backwards, merciful in their pull.