January 2025
Bio Note: I've had the privilege of having poems published in Verse-Virtual previously, most recently in July, 2023. In the intervening months, I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The MFA program had been my 60th birthday present to myself. These three poems are all sonnets, which is the house my poetry most usually lives in. "Last Night in the Garden" is part of a string of "Last Night in..." poems that I and two of my MFA classmates have been working on. "My Love is Like Hammering Nails" is part of a collection of "My Love is Like...." sonnets (some harsh, some tongue-in-cheek). And "Thunder in Winter" arose while I was preparing a presentation on Anton Chekov's short story, "The Lady with the Dog," during a fiction class in my final MFA residency.
Last Night in the Garden
Last night in the garden, I saw no hope
of morning, only silver-glazed stillness.
Breath swirled and fell, rejected by the night.
Night stood as a stone wall of nothingness.
Night opened an abyss I could not hope
to cross, clutching starlight wrapped in stillness.
The garden was my last hope of the night,
standing vigil, each leaf silent witness.
Colors slept, tucked into bed, children of light.
Woodsmoke blanket, ground-cloud, translucent, white.
Time floated, whispering, shaped like a wing,
thick raspy thrum of feathered air flowing.
Grey dawn owl glides, sudden, through its hole in
night, beak stuffed with darkness time has stolen.
My Love is Like Hammering Nails
My love is like trying to hammer nails
through glass. I appreciate the concept,
but it’s obviously doomed. I suspect
that every attempt ultimately fails,
just like it has for, oh, millions of years.
But people keep trying--pitiful fools—
thinking that if they had the proper tools—
that sweet sledge they spied downtown drinking beers,
or pretty little brass upholstery tacks—
things would end differently. They could nail stacks
of window panes onto their house of heart
and not a single one would break apart,
no flying shards to slice their eyes or veins,
just glass and all the rainbows it contains.
Thunder in Winter
after Anton Chekhov, The Lady With The Dog
Why does it never thunder in winter?
she asks Papa, blissfully unaware
of bottle green, taxes, thick axle-greased
bearings. Gold-trimmed carriages run forward,
never back. Through grey ash and black cinder,
block after stone block, dull miasmic air.
Why is winter’s cold passion not released
in one bright flash? Slow flakes drift, well-ordered,
from dim, dull, ashen sky. But she knows why.
She only wants to hear his voice answer.
It’s nothing more than childish banter,
to see if he agrees with her school books.
Silence. Bare linden trees. The croak of rooks.
She does not know how much it made him cry.
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