November 2018
I don’t think coherently about anything until I have picked up a Lamy fountain pen and let the ink glide across an unlined page in my Rhodia notepad. My family, poetry, my long-running workshop, and my standard poodle are the passions of my life. My latest book, Gravity: New and Selected Poems is now a reality; I plan to travel with it this year, and hope to meet many V-V poets along the way.
Here is another poem from the “way back” machine. “Cerritos” is from my first book, Mansions, and was also my first anthologized poem, appearing in A New Geography of Poets, University of Arkansas Press, edited by Edward Field, who later became, and still is, a great friend.
Here is another poem from the “way back” machine. “Cerritos” is from my first book, Mansions, and was also my first anthologized poem, appearing in A New Geography of Poets, University of Arkansas Press, edited by Edward Field, who later became, and still is, a great friend.
Cerritos
To hide the cinder-block fence,
my husband and I plant bamboo
dug from the San Gabriel riverbed,
push sunflower seeds into old dairy
soil lightened with azalea mix,
scatter wildflower seeds over
the ground where many years ago
the Dutch brought their cows.
Across the street, the man-made lake
is a stopping place for migrating waterfowl.
Mergansers join abandoned
Easter ducks, mallards and coots.
Cormorants fly in from the ocean,
dive for fish, stand one-legged
at the edge of the lake,
their black wings half-spread.
Pete, an old dairy man,
fishes this lake every morning.
He says, “I hate those damn birds,”
then stands on one foot, arms
flailing for balance, and croons
like a cormorant—a low gobbling sound.
We are Dutch too, but so far back
what remains is blondness
and our names. I think
we’re here by accident. But,
I wonder if some ancestral force
pulled us to this lake,
this patch of suburb land.
Our neighbors say bamboo
will over-run our lawn.
We are patient, sitting on damp
winter-yellow Bermuda, digging
into this ground, wondering who
thought to change the name
of our flat town from Dairy Valley
to little mounds. We are patient,
listening for the dark warble
of the cormorant, the distant lowing of cows.
from Mansions, 1990
© 2018 Donna Hilbert
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