Just Listen


When I told him my dream 
of the gourd rattle shape-shifting 
into a bat, its furred face pressing 
hard against my ear and whistling, 
the Lumbee elder offered,

The Indians know about such things.
You must go into the forest alone
and sit down at the base of an oak.
Don’t think about your dream,
or what I’m saying.
Just listen.

I never followed his advice, but years later,
driving through a nearby woods, I remember 
the old oak that held my childhood swing— 
the oak that saved me from a hunter's bullet 
shot from the marshes behind my house,

saved me from a death that flew so close 
I heard it whistle by my ear as my feet 
pumped hard against the dirt, and the oak 
seat carried me higher and higher 
into another world.




In the Cloak Room


I’m in the cloak room off kindergarten
in PS 21, the old elementary school still
standing on the asphalt playground of 

my memory — a dim closet smelling of wet
wool, a cave at the back of the classroom.
I have closed the heavy sliding doors 

with their pebbled glass panes, and 
I’m counting the brass hooks that hold 
our wet jackets and snow-pants, 

then staring at the scuffed linoleum 
where some snow-beaded wool mittens 
have fallen to drift atop the tumble 

of red and black galoshes, the kind 
whose latches snap shut, closing
the flannel-lined front runnels.

On this chilly night of early winter
when all of us have been home for
years now—and some are long asleep,

I am back in this musty cloakroom,
trying to find which boots are mine and
wanting to climb again into my snowsuit,

zip it up all by myself, then snuggle
into a corner, feeling warm and safe
in the familiar dark.




Night Watch

​ 
All night I watch 
the movement of snow 
toward water. 
 
Waking again and again, 
I check the window, 
looking for a thaw 
under the streetlight, 
a white withdrawal 
at the edge of the lawn. 
 
Across the planet, missiles 
discover one another, 
kin embracing kin 
in the night sky. 
 
How briefly each one lives 
above or in the dirt 
that can not refuse it.

[Previously published in Turtle Blessing, 1996]