June 2019
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
sontagk@ripon.edu
NOTE: After 22 years of teaching in the prairies of Wisconsin, I now live in the Berkshires with my husband and Brittany Spaniel Lucy where I'm grateful for mountain views and swims in as many lakes as possible once the ice thaws and before it returns. I am co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), and published widely in journals and anthologies. A pantoum of mine is forthcoming in Raintown Review, and I am editing an anthology of poems about hair. I owe much gratitude to FF and the entire V-V community for continued sustenance and support.
Merwin’s Doors: In Dream & Elegy
This is a place where a door might be
-W.S. Merlin
You were my first door
You were my second door
my third and fourth
you had so many doors
I walked through
a mere ghost of a girl
lost at sea hearing
the odd formality
of your foghorn
drawing me closer
I was a virgin in the way
words could repeat so tightly
at the same time unlocking
doors in every direction
But your hands lit my way
past sparrow songs
celestial runes haunting the sky
flights of sestina stairs I followed
I still dream of the dancing bears
in your world green with beasts
Through your evolving doors
you carried ladders
and I carried them too
light and magical as sails
helping me cross your river
of bees without getting stung
webs weaving me into
your huckleberry woman
to the land where fathers
and daughters barely speak
but whose doors remain open
Just when I’ve entered every door
I find one more and one more
In dreams all doors are open
to the one who is dreaming
No one has seen this yet
If I could show it to anyone
I would show it to you
© 2019 Kate Sontag
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF