May 2024
Bio Note: I've had poems in Plume, Cincinnati Review, Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Lips, Verse-Virtual (2021 and two 2018 issues, which began some lovely email friendships) and others; my poetry collection The Scheme of Things was published in 2015 (David Robert Books). My essay, “Randall Jarrell and Adrienne Rich: A Found Guide to Mutual Admiration,” was published in the Fall 2019 Hudson Review. When I lived in New Jersey I was a Geraldine Dodge Poet and have wonderful memories of Jim Haba's amazing Dodge Festival and the Dodge community. I live part-time in Chapel Hill, NC and Sandisfield, MA where I'm president of the Sandisfield Arts Center.
Trillium
A Spring ephemeral
March mud slides into April,
April slaps the house silly,
slams the door back in my face.
May, I take a morning walk
in an anorak, only to find
trout lily’s sprouted gills
instead of flowers. Aeolus
roars and shoves me home,
my retreat now one more
sad retreat. I’ll stay in
and set the locks against
this botch, this washed-out
washed-up spring—
So who is it who calls
my name, and who is it then
who runs, arms akimbo,
down the brambly
path, afraid to be
too late, afraid
this mean and frigid
mountain has no more
place for fragile beauty?
Who but I
who cups the wide
leaves in shaky
palms, lifts
the bowed and
blood-red head
for a kiss,
thrilled once more
by what I’d almost lost?
On Cold Spring Road
Sunday Morning
Round black back out of the trees ahead –
Dog – big dog – bear!
The road she lopes across –
a moment’s macadam chink
in the wild ever – my walk.
The forest she lives in –
my own New England woods.
At the sun’s last reach, her turn back
rises my heart with her rise
to human height, full on
a creature facing me
as I face her – eye to eye.
My footstep forward starts
toward what I can never follow –
what neither one of us can know.
Turning for home,
she sinks to all fours, turns into
the dark, four-footed animal she is,
takes her shadow into the deep,
the vanishing us.
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