September 2017
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
sontagk@ripon.edu
After retiring from 22 years at Ripon College, I have moved to the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels. While I miss my students, colleagues, prairie walks, and skies filled with sandhill cranes, I am nourished by the beauty of the mountains every time I walk up the road or take a drive. Co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), my most recent publications include Cooking With The Muse(Tupelo), SoFloPoJo, One, and Crab Orchard Review
Editor's Note: This poem is based on a line from Michael Minassian's poem, YOUR PARTY, which I published in February 2017.
“Made of bee wings and the breath of sun”
-Michael Minassian
Let your mother’s return this morning be constructed
not from a cow skull and calico roses but a snow squall’s
surprising flurry of energy, her brief dying a kind of cold
reckoning stinging the cottonwoods with her two-year
absence that startles no less than this wasp appearing
out of what winter crack in the world lightheaded? Let
wings translate to pinions, perhaps hers. When the word
is spoken feel the room warm as the creature stutters
from window to ceiling to wall. Also see the word mutate to
piñon, blow a piney fragrance almost edible. As she crosses
an arroyo to sketch, hear her cracking tiny brown
nuts between her teeth. Each inhalation in her
ascent slightly labored, she leaves you a trail of shells
from river to hills when she moves about the desert
alive, to her borrowed house of adobe, her hammered
silver rings waiting, her courtyard full of stars.
“Made of bee wings and the breath of sun”
-Michael Minassian
Let your mother’s return this morning be constructed
not from a cow skull and calico roses but a snow squall’s
surprising flurry of energy, her brief dying a kind of cold
reckoning stinging the cottonwoods with her two-year
absence that startles no less than this wasp appearing
out of what winter crack in the world lightheaded? Let
wings translate to pinions, perhaps hers. When the word
is spoken feel the room warm as the creature stutters
from window to ceiling to wall. Also see the word mutate to
piñon, blow a piney fragrance almost edible. As she crosses
an arroyo to sketch, hear her cracking tiny brown
nuts between her teeth. Each inhalation in her
ascent slightly labored, she leaves you a trail of shells
from river to hills when she moves about the desert
alive, to her borrowed house of adobe, her hammered
silver rings waiting, her courtyard full of stars.
© 2017 Kate Sontag
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