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Poem From The Other Room
It’s late. His familiar footfall paces from the parlor to the kitchen and back again.
During commercials I hear the faucet running on-off, on-off, a clink of dishes,
the chime of glassware. He steps back into the living room to watch the show: bullets
fire, a clandestine meeting is hastily convened. He won’t sit down until the dishes
are done and piled in the drainer. He dries his hands on a dishtowel standing midway
in the doorframe. I see the yellow corners flap like wingtips of a canary preening.
“You know,” he says, “it’s bad luck to leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight.”
“I believe you,” I say, “I have my own good luck. Come and get some,” I say,
“because, you know, good luck rubs off.”
The Rookery
after Henry Moore's
Draped Reclining Mother and Baby
Like a seaweed pod
bulbous, swollen, glistening –
the mother’s burnished head tenses
looking out to sea. She is heavy,
hard, at a glance, supple as a sea lion
flopping across the sand
like one big muscle, to bask
in the sun; her pup is close by.
The reclining woman is unafraid,
unpretentious, big, impossible
to move in the gravity of land,
solid but sleek in the briny
deep. The baby is inert
with intertidal weight. She
trusts the mother’s unconstructed
bulk, resting in the embryonic
hollow of her arm –
at high tide they will rise
and lumber over rocks
to heft and slide
polished bodies back again
into their aquatic origins.
published in Ekphrastic Revie
The Promise of Snow
for Jenny Butler
Banished to the cloakroom
for talking in class.
“Be still’” I was told,
as my eyes became adjusted
to the dimness of long
and narrow room,
coats hung in happenstance
on shiny black hooks
with fat rounded tips
curving upwards in prayer.
The door closed
on the silence within.
Sitting on a low step stool,
hot cheeks in bony hands,
my elbows made dimples
in my knees.
The gray light of the afternoon
floated in from thick panes
of a window behind me.
And yet it did not light
the farthest corner of the room
where a tall, metal cabinet
held paper, pencils and
heavy textbooks neatly stacked,
I knew, behind locked doors.
I turned away from the
shadows lurking there
and stood on tiptoe
looking out on bare branches
and the winter sky
that promised snow.
My chin perched
on crossed arms
I gazed toward the red
brick tower and its ledges
of stone, where the big
bells rang every Sunday –
where brave starling lit
to look about –
and I see the city
spread far and wide –
a vast hilly landscape
of two-story houses and
chimneys and evergreens
set among the bristling
silhouettes of gray barren trees.
My talons scratch against
the granite ledge,
my body lifts, drifting
through the sky, the soft
sound of wings pumping,
rushing now towards
the cold horizon
and the rocky shore
of silver green waters below.
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