Seeing at Night

Leaning forward and furrowing her brow,
the sales consultant asked, didn’t I want room darkening shades?
Without waiting for an answer, she pulled from her case
the sample that showed how a charcoal lining shuts out light.
Make my bedroom a vault? I didn’t say it but it clarified things.
No, I said as evenly as I could, I want the white, translucent ones,
the kind I can keep open at the top.
I didn’t tell her, but I’m telling you
that along with a little privacy, I want to lie awake
visited by moonlight and unaccountable strings of words that come like stars,
haunted by moonless black where memories stalk,
nuzzled by winter morning’s slow reveal.
I am telling you this as I sit where I can watch
the slanting sun engrave the sky with stately pines
and imagine the few quivering leaves that cling to the maintain ash
are cedar waxwings hovering near the cold-fermented berries
they will pluck and drink next spring.

first published in The Poetry Porch

Red-winged Blackbirds Return

On a steely day in March my sister and I
are breathing hard from heaving snow off my driveway.
June, who lives in the South, grows tired from novel
exertion. I’ve had more practice, but I’m mortally tired
from bearing the weight of interminable winter and grief.
Overhead a cardinal trims the sky in swooping
scallops, singing do-whee-to, do-whee-to, do-whee-to,
momentarily loosening the shroud that wraps my mind
in my husband’s dying days, my shrunken life and
the taunt of daily mail that insists he still lives.
It is sweet to hear my sister’s breath and movement,
for months have passed without anyone here but ghosts.
We pause, leaning on our shovels. A chorus
of voices trills from the woods, the first red wings.
Oh, you have them too, June says, surprised.
Remember them in Arkansas on Grandma’s farm?
I heave into memory, seeing the July-ripe fields
rippling with heat but hear no birds when I query
the past. Right now I can barely recall the heart-leap
each year when here in Vermont, the red wings’ return
points me toward a spring that by all other signs
is impossible to believe in. In the coming days, as June,
who is Buddhist, calls on hosts of ancestors whose qualities
and wisdom witness to hope from far off lines,
my ears slowly awaken to Grandma’s red wings
feasting and singing pthrrreee-pthreeee-pthreee.
My sister magnifies the incarnate force of birds
that yearly return to the pale North—even now
to the lonely habitat inside me. Hear the company.

first published in The Poetry Porch

At the Shore after Long Absence

For John O’Donohue

I crest the dune to behold an ageless majesty
unfold–the elemental conversation of wind and water
revealing to the cliffs and beached boulders their gradual
transfiguration into grains of granite, pearls
of amber quartz, calcified fragments of ancient
life and slivers of glittering mica refined
to a ribbon of sky-reflecting sand that soothes
my feet and coaxes my mind to yield its busy
whirr to the simple sense of a sapphire sea
winking at the sun beyond a lace fringe
of waves that make a rhythmical clap, clap,
clap, clap with their other hand, the beach.

first published in The Poetry Porch

Influenza, October 1918

First Grandpa took sick, stumbling in from the pasture
as though he’d been snake bit
and falling into bed where he nearly died.
After the crisis, in the hours between nursing baby Louise,
Grandma went out to wash the bodies of neighbors who died–
until the night she came back to find Louise wheezing,
already blue from lungs that would drown.
Come morning, though the little red head lay still
and Grandma’s full breasts must have ached,
she trudged to the barn to milk the Jersey
and dug potatoes that lay like tiny heads in the sucking clay.
Then she washed Louise, put her in her going-to-church dress
and drove with Grandpa the twenty some miles
to the nearest photographer
so they could always bring their firstborn’s face to mind.
She and Grandpa never spoke much that I could see.
Did something between them die that day?
Did they blame each other for bringing death home
or did they blame themselves?
What was it like come spring when Grandma’s belly swelled
with another child, who would be my mother?

first published in The Poetry Porch

Safe

Thunder growls. Out back my father hacks
another weed, looks up, clutches the hoe
and heads in, passing mother, who strides to the clothes line
to free the sheets already whipped by wind.

Big sister and brother appear out of nowhere,
their arms full of flashlights and comics and dragging a rug
to set up camp in the closet at the center of the house.
I’m five and a baby to them but their look includes me.

Lightning flashes with startling cracks and the hot wind
of a wolf’s breath shakes our house made only of wood.
I know an Arkansas storm is bigger than almost
anything—it snaps trees and makes houses go blind.

Here in the closet my sister and brother are calming
the dark with their flashlights, their legs tucked up near mine.
Beyond this wall our parents are guarding the windows
where hail burns like my cheeks do when sparklers spit fire.

first published in Speckled Trout Review