wound

Oh papaya,

I am not certain

your flesh

was worth

this cut.

you have no teeth

- my own devotion

makes me bleed.

pressed to my lips

pressed to another’s

you are the same.

Fall Leaves

Here is the difference.
When I was young it didn't matter

the color or condition.
I gathered all the fall leaves
to save them
with wax and paper.
Now even the most perfect leaf
red –the color you preferred
I’ve learned
does not belong to me
an old believer
here by chance.

 

looking at your picture

I didn’t mean for you to haunt me.

there are no dead
these days.
we sing only elegies of the defeated
full mouth
full bellies
grieving, sad.
I can’t name you
- not to others-
though all night long I speak to you.
it cuts the cloth of the dark.
the world is always alive
all memories, all feelings
lit with electricity.

On the Occasion of an Abundance of Maple Seeds

 

You brought me home a maple seed
Held aloft like a magical dragon wing.
You had never noticed them before
And  wanted me too to try
To make it spin to earth.
And I thought -
Child
   Child
       Child
How can it be that I am the tree?
I am this seed
Falling
   Falling
     Turning and whirling
when you are close to me
Through this brief time
We are blessed
To share together.

lessons picking berries

 

things you learn picking strawberries:

you are old.
joints hurt bent among the rows
so close to the ground.
 I am old, true
but then when I was  young
I would not have been picking strawberries.
others would have done it better.
and the berries, hiding in the straw
would not have reminded me
of my own shy child
meeting his new teacher
pressed damp and nervous to my legs.
when I was young, I would not have smiled
to think of the food the berries would make
for my family – spoonbread,
pies, jam.
when I was young, the packages
disappeared into my grandmother’s kitchen
and came back out as plates of food.
I didn’t understand then the alchemy
of sugar, crust, butter and milk.
my grandmother had a hard life
and didn’t suffer children well.
certainly,
not in the kitchen.
I was never forgiven the Thanksgiving
I was underfoot
when the turkey came out of the oven.
for her mistakes were indelible
like berry juice
spilt on white shorts.
when my grandmother died
my mother asked me if I would like her recipes.
she’d lost use for them years ago,
-in fact , long before she left.
I use them to make jam
while my own children sit on the kitchen floor
coloring, stuffing berries into their mouths.
even as a child I knew
I knew it was better to be old.
to be old picking berries.

worm love

tonight our love

feels like a worm
summoned to the surface
by the vibration of the rain.
my dim cluster of nerves
- a brain of sorts - you might call it
struggles to remember
this sound of danger.
-have I heard it before?
like an earthworm I'm
washed away
by less water than it might
take to fill a child's little cup.

Rich's Poem

This is a poem written for an old friend Rich Kooyer. He passed away this week in a manner that was as sudden as it was unexpected. I'm still trying to process my feelings through the shock. With his passing, I am feeling the silence after the note - the symphony of his life.  He was a good friend - always a good friend - even when I was not.  I will remember him for the rest of my life.


this past Spring evening
I went for a walk.
before leaving I had been troubled
by some piece of
television news
and the sky above seemed
like a furrowed field
rows of red sky
broken by thin banks of clouds
or perhaps a crumbling wall.
I thought
we are all that remains of this world
we live in the ruin of yesterday.
50 miles away
-though I wouldn’t know it
‘til morning - my friend lay dying.
38 years old.
strange that a man who was all heart
would be betrayed
in the final treacherous act
by what was revealed
to be a mere human muscle.
here is one thing that time
has taught me about both lovers and old friends.
if you loved them
-even years after-
when you think of them
it’s like a chord
or a bell being rung
in your body.
the silence after the note
-if they are absent-
is its own nameless pain.
if you never loved them, no matter
what you called them, or the words
that you spoke or the promises made,
though they made you laugh or cry
or swear or if you fought with them or shared
an apartment or just a meal
-if you never loved them
when they are absent
you simply never think of them at all.

Bridget Zinn -Author of Poison

I didn’t know the late Bridget Zinn personally, but I was moved by her story. You can read about it in words better than mine from the Chicago Tribune.

Ms. Zinn’s first book Poison was published this last week. She died of colon cancer at 33 (the same disease that took my husband’s mother at nearly the same age), before the publication of her first book. In support of her first book, we were asked to post about firsts in our own lives.

 I thought about returning to poetry – breaking through a long drought (ten years) to start writing it again. It felt like a first – perhaps the first time you see an old friend after years and years of separation.

 Thanks for stopping by to read my poem about firsts. If you can, please buy Bridget Zinn’s book Poison.

the first

 

like a needle you draw me

through the cloth.

like a needle, i know

how love is made.

nothing is new.

i feel the spinner’s hands

i know her age

she cannot hide it.

i feel the weaver’s breath

bent to the work

the knots took everything.

it is written there

in the lines of her mouth,

in the cloth itself.

like a needle you draw me

to the skin.

i know how it is made.

i know it is human.

nothing is new.

still we press against it

- eyes closed –

it feels like the first

sliding through our hands

silk, water

only cloth.

younger poem

i give you this love
as round as my thigh
- i give it to you
like bread between hands
like a woman.
i give you this love from the socket
of my hip
not from my heart
but from my heel
crushed hard against stone.

nights

there are nights
when i can think
when i can write the words
he never loved me.
if it is written
it must be true
if it is true, there can be
no argument
and i am weary of argument.
there are nights when i remember
in the silence
how you opened my chest
and my heart
fell apart
like the seeds of a
pomegranate.
you never loved me.
its written in books
in my poems.
i write the words.
i write the words
for the nights i can think.

to keep

here is the man i married
his great gentle hands
each the size of a dinner plate.
since I met him
I have long suspected
that I might unravel in those hands
like a soft skein
of gray wool
and simply be no more
- to never again fear to sleep
and never again unwind in worry
Here is the man I married.
I picture him gently
saving my loose threads in a cardboard box
carried to the closet
placed among his other things
labeled “to keep.”

mammogram

I had a mammogram today
the technician and I bent together
over her computer screen
peering at the picture
inside me
I smiled (why not?  – even the fatal
can be beautiful)
at great swaths of grey
how I’ve swollen over the years!
fissured with lines of coarser
tissue
stark and white
we might have been seventh graders sitting
at the science table staring
at pictures of the universe
my breasts
re-imagined by the Hubble telescope
I suppose
there’s an old belief here
on the Northern Plains
older than the farmers,
the railroaders, the doctors
and the reluctant junior high science students
that we come from
the stars
and we return to them
in this room I find them
alive in my chest
their strands and constellations
strung like a milky way
my own galaxy of tissue
and flesh