October 2015
I'm a poet and writer living for the past six years in the South Jersey shore area. I moved here from North Jersey in 2009 after the 2008 death of my husband William J. (Bill) Higginson, author of The Haiku Handbook, to be closer to my daughter and family. I'm a mom, grandma, and sometimes poet-teacher for the NJSCA. My work has appeared in many journals, and in twenty-some books (including chapbooks). I read at the Dodge Festival in 2010, and have enjoyed two poetry residencies at VCCA (January 2011; March 2015). Please visit my website:www.2hweb.net/penhart and my blog: http://penhart.wordpress.com
The Door in the Sun
As if there were a door in the sun.
As if somehow that door opened
into a dark heart, its hydrogen frame
blinding those who enter.
As if we would not burn,
would not return to brilliant gas
and dust if we went through,
leaving the blaze behind
like a story we once knew,
its aura still flickering
at the edges of our flesh,
a story we've been feeding
all our lives.
As if we could enter
the still point, the pause
between heartbeats,
the incandescent darkness
where the blood waits
and then goes on.
-first published in Buried in the Sky (La Alameda Press, 2001)
Recycling Starlight
Is this your destination—the ashes
that were you first sinking back
into damp soil, as if Eden were
a holy compost pile, then spiraling,
invisible, out of that mix into
the gaseous fire of a nascent star?
We often spoke of being recycled,
of how our very molecules were
just visiting. We affirmed the old
adage, Nothing is ever lost,
as we sat across from one another,
our computer screens flickering on
and off.
This morning, in my new life
without you, the mulch is pungent
in the flowerbed under my window,
the sky gray and promising rain.
And I wonder—as I breathe
in the fertile air rising
from this garden that waits
for the sun to do its work—
if I’m inhaling you.
-first published in Recycling Starlight (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2010)
The Resonance Around Us
As we walk through this field, coarse grasses
vibrate around our ankles. Listen, we are already
in the sky, its rising glissando trembling in the
hollows of our bones—our bones that might be
wind chimes hanging from the trees, clattering
like a hard rain.
Tonight it will snow, each crystal a tuning fork
for the other, each of our upturned faces echoing
the quiet ticking flakes that home on us.
Even those things we deem silent—dead weeds
nodding by the barn, the piles the horses drop
as they drift through the pasture, steam rising
from each before it cools—even these are
singing in their spheres.
Listen, and you might hear the choir of atoms,
those unseen constellations that make flesh,
flickering on and off as they resonate with
the dead who float beside us, their substance
oscillating faster than we apprehend.
Just now some bird that knows the notes
of twilight opened its beak to offer a brief
harmony, and as the dark descends in solemn
chords, a chorus of plum clouds begins to hum
on Earth’s horizon.
-first published in The Resonance Around Us (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2013)
As if there were a door in the sun.
As if somehow that door opened
into a dark heart, its hydrogen frame
blinding those who enter.
As if we would not burn,
would not return to brilliant gas
and dust if we went through,
leaving the blaze behind
like a story we once knew,
its aura still flickering
at the edges of our flesh,
a story we've been feeding
all our lives.
As if we could enter
the still point, the pause
between heartbeats,
the incandescent darkness
where the blood waits
and then goes on.
-first published in Buried in the Sky (La Alameda Press, 2001)
Recycling Starlight
Is this your destination—the ashes
that were you first sinking back
into damp soil, as if Eden were
a holy compost pile, then spiraling,
invisible, out of that mix into
the gaseous fire of a nascent star?
We often spoke of being recycled,
of how our very molecules were
just visiting. We affirmed the old
adage, Nothing is ever lost,
as we sat across from one another,
our computer screens flickering on
and off.
This morning, in my new life
without you, the mulch is pungent
in the flowerbed under my window,
the sky gray and promising rain.
And I wonder—as I breathe
in the fertile air rising
from this garden that waits
for the sun to do its work—
if I’m inhaling you.
-first published in Recycling Starlight (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2010)
The Resonance Around Us
As we walk through this field, coarse grasses
vibrate around our ankles. Listen, we are already
in the sky, its rising glissando trembling in the
hollows of our bones—our bones that might be
wind chimes hanging from the trees, clattering
like a hard rain.
Tonight it will snow, each crystal a tuning fork
for the other, each of our upturned faces echoing
the quiet ticking flakes that home on us.
Even those things we deem silent—dead weeds
nodding by the barn, the piles the horses drop
as they drift through the pasture, steam rising
from each before it cools—even these are
singing in their spheres.
Listen, and you might hear the choir of atoms,
those unseen constellations that make flesh,
flickering on and off as they resonate with
the dead who float beside us, their substance
oscillating faster than we apprehend.
Just now some bird that knows the notes
of twilight opened its beak to offer a brief
harmony, and as the dark descends in solemn
chords, a chorus of plum clouds begins to hum
on Earth’s horizon.
-first published in The Resonance Around Us (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2013)
©2015 Penny Harter