May 2018
Poems can be old friends, like the trees you planted in a garden many years ago and just now seem them reaching above your head. Planning to move across the country has cut into my writing time, but not the love for that time and the people and poems that others offer. Spring begs for gratitude. I'm feeling it as my new book How I Learned To Be White gets launched from Antrim House.
The Opera Company Sells Its Costumes
Morning smeared fog on our forest.
Dense like night disguises, light there
like kick-up petticoats in pastoral comedy.
Mist erases a neighbor’s house across the creek.
The family whose name I do not know.
The why’s of weather don’t matter.
Morning should lift those vapors
that layer like newspaper sections
on sports, lifestyles, stock market turns –
or ads for the sale of stage wardrobes.
How often now we use that ungentle word
surveil as a verb, watching over me. Clouds
hover as we wrap up inside sequined warrior
fatigues, mummy wraps, gowns smirched with blood
from spousal blows, neoprene court jackets,
or wool doublets of shepherds. Tickets to the auction
sold out faster than it takes our lazy scrap of sun
to free my shrouded woods from gray surveil.
The Opera Company Sells Its Costumes
Morning smeared fog on our forest.
Dense like night disguises, light there
like kick-up petticoats in pastoral comedy.
Mist erases a neighbor’s house across the creek.
The family whose name I do not know.
The why’s of weather don’t matter.
Morning should lift those vapors
that layer like newspaper sections
on sports, lifestyles, stock market turns –
or ads for the sale of stage wardrobes.
How often now we use that ungentle word
surveil as a verb, watching over me. Clouds
hover as we wrap up inside sequined warrior
fatigues, mummy wraps, gowns smirched with blood
from spousal blows, neoprene court jackets,
or wool doublets of shepherds. Tickets to the auction
sold out faster than it takes our lazy scrap of sun
to free my shrouded woods from gray surveil.
© 2018 Tricia Knoll
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