Poem: Winter blur

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Winter blur

I
How strange suddenly
to read the word ermine
and think of a
woman’s neck,

warmed, blurred
with white fur, and not
to see the long stoat’s
winter skin—alive, bounding;

II
O marquise winter moon,
rustle of skirt on the balcony,
and the agony to fly;

when a man feels your whiteness,
he soars; toward what, I wonder:
the sun’s reflection, or some
other light, conquering within?


January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Notes:
stoat: mustela ermenia, or ermine
marquise: this shape, a cut of a diamond 

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Poem: The intelligence of snow

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The intelligence of snow

To float

from the massive

cloud of unknowing

down

without hurry

or tension

into the amplitude open

above fields humped and blurry

and the gentle

geometry of roofs

falling

with no clear

apprehension

loose—adrift, or cast—

resting and feathering

across downy light,

or, becoming light

without edge

descending

and hovering

where buzzards meditate

a white spider

hanging and swinging

(without gossamer thread)

into the quietude

of outstretching spruces

tossed and bob-slipping

past treetops

beside

blue jays jerking

and nuthatches skipping

at last touching

into place

with soft pliancy

weightless wafer

on the bird feeder’s lip

onto one black seed

instantly scooped

The solitary

snow flake

dissolving

in the mitered beak

of the cardinal

in its ultimate

and particular

gesture of praise

December 2011

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Poem: Beating flames

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Beating flames

Rain falls
in the rhythm
of a bird’s heartbeat;

but when the crow cries,
his raucous call
does not pierce
this thrumming trance.

Rather,
like the cast iron
of the wood stove—black body,
rising up—he carries
the beating flame, hungry
and consuming, crackling
the language of the heart.

Illustration by Ива́н Я́ковлевич Били́бин, aka Ivan Bilibin (thanks, Montag!), for Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's poem "Two Crow." Unrelated to my poem, but interesting anyway, from wiki on "Twa corbies" (or "The Three Ravens): " . . . a 1828 partial translation of the French translation of Sir Walter Scott's Border Poems. It includes the poem entitled 'Шотландская песня' (Scottish Song), which has become known to almost every literate Russian-speaking person. Pushkin's translation contains only the first half of the poem, ending with 'and the mistress awaits for her lover, not the killed one, but the alive one', thus making a dark hint the central point of the story. Many composers of the time wrote musical interpretations of the poem."

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Poem: the turquoise sea for Christmas

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I read a billboard:

Gifting made easy.
I mourned suddenly
the loss of giving.

And I thought
of the green-glazed vase
curved like cupped hands
(or your opalescent cheek)
on top of the cabinet.

Or the perfect green field
and the turquoise sea.

I would like to give
them all to you.
But they
are already yours.

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Poem: Dark winter morning with the dogs

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Dark winter morning with the dogs

Dog stars Sirius and Aludra gnaw
the bones of the black locust trees;
a rout of coyotes behind the woods
barks and sings a round for the chickens,
gone these three years from their shallow roosts;
a meteor falls like a seed of fire
into that sleeping corner of the barn
and lights up its empty boxes; see
the straw mixed with chicken guano
that remains after three summer gardens, ablaze
and still abundant on the floor; my sleeping husband
dreams of the next planting, starting with the shovel
and the shit, the wheel barrow, the eternal stew;
Murzim howls, Muliphen listens, and Aludra,
a virgin, hungers with everlasting heat.

Poetry should be heard.

Quite literally the other morning, a shooting star fell behind the barn, right there, while coyotes clamored, either after, or in preparation, for their early morning hunt.


Hubble image of Canis Major's "evil eyes" found here.
For information about Canis Major and the stars that shine in the constellation, go here.

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Poem: Woman and cloud

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Woman and cloud

From her propped hospital bed
the old woman who nearly died
a few days ago now talks and
talks, while a continental drift of cloud
passes over the hospital and suburbs.
They are each unaware of the other,
the sheeted woman and the gray cloud;
both snowcapped, and round at the edges;
both moving in the minimal float
that seems a physical impossibility
when gravid with so much fluid;
there is much winter to come, and harshly;
they hold it up like a woman’s flounces.

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Winter poem by Hayden Carruth: The Curtain

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Since I love exploring winter in all sorts of light, here is a tremendous winter poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) to spread out in — to feel the contrast between the romance and beauty of winter, and the pain of existence. Carruth was an American poet from Woodbury, Connecticut. I don't know his work well, though I've known of him for years, but I mean to.

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

*Note: This page says that Carruth's Selected Poetry was a finalist for the 1987 poetry Pulitzer, but I do not see evidence that he won for 1996, which the Poetry Foundation claims. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey in 1996, the volume this poem is from. NPR has this moving article upon his death in 2008. Read more about him at the Poetry Foundation.
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Poem (with apologies to Blake): Waiting for snow

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All of November nearly gone, and not a snowfall worth chatting about around the office water cooler. Cooled water, harumph! I want snow. We went to see the Nutcracker the other night. Lovely, you know. The dance of the snowflakes just beautiful, and the Snow King and Queen. But, harumph!

I wander around the meadow path, and all I can find is evergreen and brown. Where is the harsh winter that was promised, huh?

In my snowlust, I walked and could not get "The Tyger" out of my head, though that is about stars and tigers and the Creator and what is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. I thought about my recovering mother-in-law and the proximity of terror and joy: almost gone, then in a day or two sprouting jokes and love. The air was cold, and I kept thinking about the tearful symmetry of snowflakes, and the dancing ones in Nutcracker, and the rhythm of my feet on the ground that was beating out rhyming, metered verse. Like this. (Seriously, my apologies to Wm. Blake for this.)

Waiting for snow

Snowflake, snowflake, come to me

down the spiral of this breeze;

where on mountains do you hide—

in Shambhala, or Telluride?

In what distant keeps or skies

swirl the centers of your eyes;

white unseen, at heights too high

for me to catch, or eat, or slide.

And your Winter, where is She,

poet Mistress of Tchaikovsky?

And when the Finns flop onto ice,

wouldn’t some for me be nice?

Where the crystals? where the drifts,

in what hollow blues my bliss?

And where does power click and fail

under avalanche and gale!

While the blizzard puffs the tree

in Anchorage and Nikiski,

Michigan wind just blows us bare:

the birds and I, we perch and stare.

Snowflakes, snowflakes on the stage,

bobbing tulle in a silver haze;

groove the dance, chill the Queen;

sift powdered sugar on these evergreens!

The Muse of Winter another year

If the ballet doesn't work,
there's always Ahmad Jamal

playing "Snowfall" at the Alhambra in London;
for something kind of cool, load the YouTube video,
turn the volume down a fair bit and listen to me read
my poem on podcast here with Jamal playing in the background.

:-)

William Blake's "The Tyger"

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Poem: Blue hour

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Blue hour

The tall spruce with wild
but silent upcurled arms
conducts the cool dark night
on a track of wind into morning’s
thinness; like God, and I lying still
under him; my moon-white face
a lit candle floating in the font
of the hot tub; the wind on my face
and arms as if prayers whispered
from a distant train; rumbling through
the entire outdoor room; the barn,
house, rocking bamboo, the hunters
asleep next door; nowhere is there
a smell of death, no deer hung,
no blood, no mouse in the mouth
of a snowy owl; this is God’s early
hour when lips are still closed, when
prayers for the dying are snored
through noses like praise out the back
door; when the doe rises on groggy
legs, believing the tender leaves
are still wet, still green.

 

We learned early Thanksgiving (Thursday) morning that my 83-year-old mother-in-law was suffering in a crisis of renal infection that had spread into her blood. It has been touch and go since then; Friday we thought we might lose her, but thanks to her medical team who made difficult decisions that saved her, and to her strength of will, she is recovering steadily, though still in ICU. This poem comes out of my morning prayers for her. "Blue Hour" — in the French "l'Heure Bleue" — called Madrugada in Spanish and Portuguese; it is the twilight between the full dark of night and the light of day. For me it is a magic hour, when occasionally dark possibilities clutch from the night, but more often my thoughts lean toward brightness and hope, toward everyday miracles in the large and small cycles of life.  

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What to do on Thanksgiving

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Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

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concrete poem, and alternate traditional form: family tree

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family tree

while   traveling

at the speed of a car   a particle hovers in the
passenger seat next to me      a neutrino of time and
space travel that I do not need to prove to anyone   or apologize

to the standing cows    for talking to myself like a mad scientist
who is to say he isn’t my self    a particle miracle      I go on
about my dead brother and gasp because he is not old enough
yet to hear about death    not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch    that opens
to the courtyard wherein the    family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother,   my father,     my mother have already

ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity    and I tell him
we don’t even know what they are

gravity    or death     or falling

but     soon    he    will
drop    and      be
caught     in
his
mother’s

ivory
hands

then

perched

and

nestled

in the

fork

of her

armpit

and

breast

his head

a plum

the crease

of his mouth open

for the galaxy of milk and I point

to the calf in the farmer’s field holding on to his mother for dear life

from the twig of her teat between the branches of her legs and say see life falls like that

Added note, from wiki: Concrete poetry or Size poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. 

 *   *   *

11/20/11 7:22am I am reposting the poem without the shape, which may be a distraction this time. Fun to experiment (as Brendan says in his comment), but maybe this poem is better served in a traditional shape. 

family tree

while traveling at the speed of a car
a particle hovers in the passenger seat next to me
a neutrino of time and space travel
that I do not need to prove to anyone
or apologize to the standing cows
for talking to myself like a mad scientist

who is to say he isn’t my self
a particle miracle

I go on about my dead brother and gasp
because he is not old enough yet to hear about death
not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch
that opens to the courtyard
wherein the family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother, my father, my mother
have already ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity
and I tell him we don’t even know what they are
gravity or death or falling
but soon he will drop
and be caught in his mother’s ivory hands
then perched and nestled in the fork
of her armpit and breast
his head a plum
the crease of his mouth open
for the galaxy of milk
and I point to the calf in the farmer’s field
holding on to his mother for dear life
from the twig of her teat between the branches
of her legs and say see life falls like that

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Poem: What I don't know is

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“The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised.”

~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 233

What I don’t know is

if a tiny black druid
croons like a grasshopper
in the wood stove
of my soul, singing
summer’s tune, rubbing
witch-hazel and rosemary,
divining love's heat
from fear's icy skin. A leap
from the lines of earth,
or the lines of Keats,
their busy, bending legs
that never tire, forever.

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

~ John Keats, from “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”

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Found poem: in the face of death, despair and fear

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I took this [film] photo in the Scottish highlands

in 1980, when I was pregnant with Lesley

I heard Representative Gabby Giffords' halting voice on the radio, recorded for the audio version of her new book. She speaks, she thinks, she attaches sentences to one another (with great difficulty), though she was shot in the head only months ago in a shopping center parking lot. My friend Susie is presenting testimony before Ohio legislators today, asking them to consider, please, not allowing people to text or even use hands-free cell phones while driving, after her granddaughter was killed in August when the driver behind was on her cell phone. I am home this morning and I can't go for a walk for fear that hunters might shoot me. There are dangers all around. How to live, without fear?

As I was thinking about these things, bits of poems surfaced, as if, like whitecaps on a stormy lake, they wanted to be scooped up by the wind, and tossed together in the air. So I have strung together the bits of poems in a found poem. Please see the list of references below, which gives the titles of the poems they are from. By the way, the top lines were posted at the Rilke blog a few days ago, from a poem elegy Rilke wrote to Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, a poet who committed suicide. (Her backstory in the Russian revolution is here.)

When I get to the last lines, by William Carlos Williams, I think of life, and death, in one whole poem of his existence. This is all a mystery, how to live . . .


in the face of death, despair and fear

Waves, Marina, we are the ocean! Depths, Marina, we are the sky!

Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times spring.

We are larks whose outbursts of song

fling them to the heavens.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly,

for God's sake!

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

How can you aim a fire?

The golden sheep are feeding, and

Their mouths harbour contentment;

Gladly my tongue praises

This hour scourged of dissension

By weight of their joyous fleeces.

Practical to the end,

               it is the poem

                                  of his existence

that triumphed

              finally.

(from "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom (II)" by Rainer Maria Rilke)

(from "No Better Gift" by Rumi) 

(from "Lines of Winter" by Mark Strand)

(from "blue" by Cara Benson)

(from "To a Very Slow Air" by Philip Larkin) 

(from "The Sparrow" by William Carlos Williams)

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Poem: A mother's breasts

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A mother's breasts

My body in the tub, candlelit,
doughy breasts shining, and
because of the baby to come
from my daughter’s body,
in this dream-light of a crone
everything is mother and baby
again, and my breasts cairns
to the memory of my children,
my daughter first, who swam to me
with her thrashing arms, and landed
a starfish hand on one white beach dune,
locked her shell-bud-mouth onto the biscuit
nipple, the soft pebble of her nose
pressed into shelter, the nipple
her doorknob into the hut—
to survive, to awaken, to trust,
to learn before the intolerable comes
with this quivering tongue, this pause
of eyes, this mouth petalled
into smile, the blue milk pooled
in the upturned keyholes at her mouth’s
curls, that this is the beginning
of life. To be kneaded
by the cupped tongue,
her eyes closed now. To be enough.
To be the bread of life.

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Poem: The Soul in November

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The Soul in November

How she looks I cannot say,
although the petal-less heads
of goldenrod, not flaming

yellow any longer,
are something like her
stillness

and so they must be the reason
I go out, after reading
the morning’s poems

written by others
at their desks, on typewriters,
or by hand in fine black ink,

and be with the blank
desaturated truth of them
standing alone

without any topaz,
though their sun-flares
are a visible memory.

Birds circle us
from tree to tree
in their orbit of the dun meadow.

Then I walk back to the house,
to my red chair,
the laptop, the empty

white sky of the page
and remember from scratch
my own small explosion.

Poetry should be heard.

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"Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand

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No snow here yet, this is from a couple of years ago . . .

Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets. In my morning devotional when I read poems at the Poetry Foundation's site, I feel wet ink on my chin from the first lines in his poem "Eating Poetry":

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. . . .

Strand's poems are often surreal, but always accessible. His craft in simple straightforward lines belies his depth of sight and spirituality. Because of my love of winter here in my white bowl meadow, I'd like to share this from him, as the season of subtle lights commences. Though it grows cold, you will go on . . . .

Lines for Winter

  
    by Mark Strand

     for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.



    ~ from New Selected Poems 

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Poem: My hair returns

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I have no idea why I am writing and posting so frequently these days. I hope it is not a hardship for you. But why should it be? You don't have to read, or comment, or nothin'. But I gotta keep this pen pumping for some reason. Whatever the lasting value (and that doesn't matter much to me) I am compelled. If you come and read, bless you, and bless you if you don't! Let it flow on by.

Here is a little bit of surreal whimsy as the sun rises over my shoulder.

My hair returns

My hair flows
out my office and
down the corridor at work,
the old, high-ceilinged university hall
with industrial lights hanging down
like dangle-pearl earrings,
not bright enough to read by.
Sadly, the old hall will come down
next year after its hundred-somethings.

My hair is gold again, in rushing waves
like in my college youth
not unlike these students who wait
outside my door
lined up in bands and ribbons
on their stiff wooden chairs on
the banks of my river-hair, with
bright white apples on their laps—
a virtual picnic!

They come for advice,
as if I am a scryer,
and my hair the crystal river
running on to their future life.

Did I tell you, I stopped straightening it
with flattening irons and other
falsehoods? And now my curls,
when you come in at last
to my room from the hall,
are the wiry wisps of a crone
who skips upriver
on the backs of stones.

Here is a photo of the top of my curlier-than-ever-it-was head at my office desk, taken by my own white apple mac magic camera. I haven't stopped coloring over the gray yet, maybe that will come. If I had Don's salt-and-pepper hair, I wouldn't think twice. Humor me, I'm taking this aging thing in baby steps.

Oh look, I just realized how like Stanisław Wyspiański's sewer I am!
Do you think she's really a redhead,
or did she (or he) color her hair too?

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Poem: A plum on All Soul's Day

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A stone fruit, nearly
midnight blue, is a globe
in my hand, shipped
from a country where
many souls are Catholic,
like Mexico or Spain,

now that our plum season
is past, and I wonder if I
will be remembered
when I am past, thought of
as among the faithful — though
not Catholic, or Christian, or

will I be as the white
gauze smear in the crease
of this plum, (like the cloud
that shawls the earth) — ghostly,
adding nothing essential

to a bite’s sweet prayer, yet
seeming necessary somehow
to the plum, to my rubbing thumb,
to my mute stone tongue, and
to the redemption of the sphere.

Poetry should be heard.

Posted for dVerse's Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Go there and read other poem-worlds. Yay, poetry pub!

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Poem: Under an autumn night sky

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With a broken-down hot tub, last winter’s night sky had to shine without us. We think of the hot tub as a vacation, spread out through the year. Even on the coldest nights (0º F, -18º C), we don stocking caps and soak for thirty minutes, groaning out the stresses of the workday, our heads laid back, eyes closed, then opened to behold the velvet sky-field with its distant lighted windows. So it was sublime when Don made a trade deal with our neighbor Bill across the road: Don’s 1974 International Harvester lawn tractor and trailer (we still have a John Deere for mowing) for a five-year-old hot tub and a face cord of cherry firewood. The hot tub needs a new pump, and then with a little Sawzall action to cut up our kaput twenty-five-year-old hot tub and get it off the deck, we’ll be back under the starry dome where the International Space Station blinks at us now and then, just after the gasp of a falling star.

Under an autumn night sky

Tree toads and crickets
have cupboarded up their cheer
for another year
while the wood stove commences
his chirp-and-clicky blaze.
Leaves of poplars
have waved farewell, tumbling
off like pilgrims down the windy road
to their southland. Above us
bony maple and locust branches 
point toward the baptismal
pool of midnight.
The milk-blue moon
rolls over the barn
like a sacred rock of Sisyphus,
lifting to her white breast
the burdens of our day.
The Seven Sisters blink
twittery poems for the man
across the hot tub. Orion unhooks
a notch in his belt, beguiling me
with his bright torch. Then suddenly
the clattering season of O Henry,
Dickens and Thomas
hoofs up the fern-lined stony hill
in her shiny black Goodwill shoes
and we are children again, sitting
in this farm nave of holy velvet,
saintly candles lit on all sides
while we congregants listen quietly
for praise from the overturned font
above the meadow, and hum along.

Poetry should be heard.

Photo of Pleides: NASA

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Poem: Stacking in October

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Thanks for relishing with me the beautiful time at the lake with Inge, what we think of as our autumn writing retreat. Besides our luxurious hours reading and conversing, I did not do any new writing there, but I did edit, shuffle and organize poems for the book I want to self publish. I was encouraged because I got farther than I expected, with even a tentative title and cover design. I have much to learn about publishing, ISBNs, and all sorts of things I would rather not be bothered about. A dear blog friend has been of great help and is giving me time on the phone today to answer questions. While I don't care all that much about "marketing" this book, seeing it as more of a small offering to those who have asked for something like this from me (so very kindly), I suppose it would be negligent of me to press ahead without ample forethought.

Anyway, this poem was written after returning home. It almost sounds as though I could use another retreat, but don't worry: winter is coming, with plenty of time for naps near the wood stove on weekends.

Stacking in October

For a few minutes’ interlude from Sunday rest
I stack firewood in the corncrib from the pile
at its door. Wrists ache. My body is heated
from within by menopausal hot flashes. I am not
exhilarated by the exercise, feeling my age. I must
sweep off the curled, dried leaves on the porch
before the wicker and potted wilting impatiens
are mere crispy mounds, like bracken covered in kudzu.
So, too, I must pluck hairs from my chin. How like
honey the sun flavors the quiet air—my one clear hope
and pleasure in these autumn minutes, until powder
rifles and shotguns ring peals from neighboring land.
Prizes are claimed, herds thinned. Winter is coming
with its losses, its sleep, and its recycled comforts.

Poetry should be heard.

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