November 2024
Bio Note: Autumn is upon us here in Southern NJ. The summer felt long and challenging, and I welcome the coming days of autumn and winter, bringing crisper days and, for me, memories of times gone by. These poems are new, sprung from giving myself time in the library to sit quietly and stay open to what might come. My three most recent books are Keeping Time: Haibun for the Journey, Still-Water Days, and A Prayer the Body Makes (Kelsay Books, 2023, 2021, 2920).
Winter Afternoons
Winter afternoons our family ghosts
have tea parties, sit around wicker
tables in parlors they have known,
sipping black tea from porcelain cups.
A gauzy curtain of snow blows between
their world and ours, but they feel no
cold. Their breath does not fog the
freezing air as ours does, becoming sky.
Sometimes, dearly beloved pets join
the party, waiting patiently or winding
around their ankles, hoping a familiar
hand will drop to scratch their furry ears.
They have no pastries with tea. They
are comforted enough by this ancient
ritual, dependable as the endless games
of bridge which my great aunts devoted
hours to, always looking for another hand
to join them when one fell short. My Nana,
perhaps, or even now and then, a great
uncle, my Poppy, or even a male cousin.
Today I am haunted by my ghosts, my dear
mother, aunt, grandmother who died when I
was just eleven—even those I’d only heard
about, long gone before I slid into this life.
It's that sudden slant of light parting a flotilla
of gray clouds to open a pale blue portal to
another world beyond our own where they’ve
already set a place for us at the family table.
What the Dark Absorbs
We send healing light to those in pain,
in need of solace. But the dark, that
soft hammock of night that swings us
into the deeps of sleep absorbs the
spectrum that each day has birthed,
its colors that dim into one, into dreams
that bind us all as the planet shows its
varied faces to our local star.
Study the dark circles under your eyes
that hang like half-moons below your
seeing, or the midnight-blue veins that
echo those your mother had running
like rivers down the runnels of her hands
toward her finger tributaries. My hands
have become her hands now as I sink
each night into a womb of bamboo sheets.
Soft and silky, these sheets glow in the
rays of the streetlight that slip between
the slats of bedroom blinds, but I close
my eyes to welcome the fusion of the dark.
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