Poems

Poems from my forthcoming book As For The Rose

That one day

Every spring there’s that one day
when buds on maples lining
my street burst into leaf,
and blossom explodes pink as summer
scoops of Cherry Garcia
against a wild Maine lupine sky.

I pick fiddleheads and the first
asparagus, and lift my face
sunward, like Vincent in Arles,
in the hospital orchard, painting
for his newborn nephew sprig after
sprig of almond blossom that looks, yes,

like the blossom I see now, riot
of pink and white and that hard clear blue
beyond, and I know that joy’s a climber
along a knife-edge ridge towards
a summit where the air’s too thin
to stay for long. Too much sun

can tip you into a cornfield
where crows hover and wait,
so I stare up and soak it in
while April wind whips around me
a froth of scattered petals
already torn from the tree.

Published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal

Limits

Let out of lockdown for a while, we walked
to a small, round pond, ochre brown and mucky,
empty apart from families of ducks
for kids to feed with crumbs while adults talked
of masking, isolating, washing hands,
the boring parts of keeping us alive.
Our toddler saw a sunning turtle, dived
to catch it, soaked himself and cried, demanded
hugs. I held him close, showed him across the way
a snowy egret, neck a sinuous snake,
its beak a dagger, stabbing for its prey
until it fanned its wings towards the sky
lifting with rapid beats, its head tucked back,
defying limits as we watched it fly.

Originally published in Wait: Poems from the Pandemic, Littoral Books 2021

Imago

Cities rise on fault-lines in a treeless desert.
Though ancestors whisper from the blindness of death,
we thirst, where is the water, who listens to them?

The click and flicker of neon blots out stars,
cars thirst for fossil fuel. In empty caverns
of the aquifer, only echoes. Lakes desiccate.

Aeons long, rivers carve canyons ; mayflies
dance on ripples, rise, sink, clasp and copulate,
lay their myriad eggs and die unfed,

robust nymphs tossing aside long liquid lives
for this change of being, temporary
beauty of veined wing and light.

Originally published in A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, Littoral Books 2020

Poems from Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber

Secret garden

When I was six I climbed
out of the kitchen window
into the garden one summer night
at 3am looking for secrets.
Damp petals on the rose arch
over the path held the moonlight
in their softness against my nose
and the musky scent pricked my throat.
I climbed the lilac tree – you could drown
in that perfume but my hands
on its thready bark as I swung down
from the branches rubbed bitterness.
My feet whispered the cool grass;
small creatures went unseen
about their night-time business.

Next day, against a bruised sky
the silver birch bent, rustled,
flickered leaves like flames.
The lilac tree shed tiny,
precise flowerets on the lawn.
A white gull flying upwards shone,
pierced like the Holy Ghost
by a shaft of sunlight.

Originally published in Naugatuck River Review 2009

Sending Bette Davis To The Plumber

Why must an icon be a plaster saint?
On a postage stamp, cigarette airbrushed,
Bette who showed consumption’s sickly taint,

how ugly dying was when you were poor,
who dragged on film her ancient body, crushed
by stroke, made movies into metaphor.

When distance hides the blood and sweat and death,
icons are only flawless cast in plaster.
It takes a silver screen to show the truth

of human bondage. What gives us a thrill
we must make ordinary and master,
throw in the mail to pay the plumber’s bill.

Originally published in Maine Taproot anthology

After apple-picking

A golden shovel on lines by Robert Frost

The tree groaned with apples, and my
kitchen filled with the smell of them, long
slow rendering into apple butter leaving two-pointed
cores, piles of peels, and still the ladder’s
up against the branches, sticking
into the crown too crowded to reach through,
though God knows you tried, stretching a
hand through any little gap in the tree
for fruit within your grasp, reaching toward
every red globe. Now I think heaven
might have a place where you are still
high on the ladder smiling at me and
handing me yet another bucketful – “There’s
more to come!” – and I am searching for a
recipe I am not already glutted with, a barrel
of apples still to use, but nothing that
I understood I had still to lose, when I
didn’t know how short the time was, didn’t
understand this fall moment’s grace. I fill
my pantry even now with jars of jam, pies beside
cake, because you said, “I hate to waste it
when it’s free,” a fine theory and
one I went along with, though there
were free things I didn’t realize one may
waste, such as time, such as maybe
those minutes between two
people that seem so ordinary, or
seasons when even though three
meals a day might contain apples
that’s not too much when there’s more to come. I
left some apples on the tree this year – didn’t
have your length of arm to pick
the highest ones, and they still hang upon
the branches, although some
are windfalls and the lower boughs
are empty; I made some apple jelly, but
snow fell before I got them all in. I
can see the tree from the kitchen and am
struck by the picture of red apples done
against black branches outlined with
white snow, a picture of apple-picking
such as I know it now.

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