​Absence


All the maple leaves
rain down in this cold wind,
yellow in the dark,

and I feel the dead again,
their lips grazing mine,
their breath on my cheeks.

I spin among them,
lifting my face
out of deep absence
into this shining.





One Childhood Illness          


One childhood illness I lie in my mother's bed,
turning the pages of an antique travel guide
to some mythical northern land,
tracing its India Ink sketches
of wooded streams, waterfalls,
a lone canoe on a birch-fringed lake,
and always in the background,
mountains.

Propped against two pillows,
I drink my tea staring at the waterfall
whose crystal body cascades down a cliff,
hear its thunder, feel its white mist
on my lips.
               Somewhere, behind it
is the cave I remember, the secret crypt
where the stone has been rolled away
and the water sings.





Tea Ceremony
for Eleanor Ecob Morse, my great-great-grandmother, 1890

She sits at her worktable,
lifts a blue glass cup 
to admire its gilded rim
as she begins to paint 
small violets on its sides.

By evening, she will have done
the whole set, blessing each blue sphere 
where violets bloom.

She does not feel the weight 
of snow that fills each cup she raises 
to the window’s light, the cold 
of blowing flakes against her hands,
or the sudden chill that finds her lips
when she pantomimes a sip.

This morning, the sky beyond her window 
deepens to the blue of finished cups
as I hold each one up to catch the sun.

--all the above poems from Grandmother's Milk (Singular Speech press, 1995).