““The difference between poetry and prose is that in prose you use language and in poetry you yield to language.” ”
Selected Poems
When All That’s Left is Loss
#1
When the sun moves west, away from the old coast,
I think of my mother -- love and loss inextricable.
Her mother, the pretty one, left her in the hospital
after giving birth. Dumped at her grandmother’s,
damage lived within her every cell. Maybe
that’s why she loved dogs, their unyielding
fidelity. On her living room wall hung a bronze cast
of a Shepard’s head with a dog collar around its neck.
My terrier, a medical rescue, had everted saccules
that closed his airways. In surgery, he nearly bled out.
Tying a vocal cord to one side, the surgeon removed
the blockage, opened his airways, stitched him up.
Then we were two creatures in one home --
him healing and me watching him breathe.
#2
As he healed, I watched him breathe.
I had watched dying, my friend
Lynne, only fifty. She’d been unresponsive
until she startled us by waking.
Am I dead or am I alive, she asked.
The night she died she woke long
enough to say This is stupid.
What made her rise up in the stark
light of the lamp? How was she cogent
after days of drifting in and out
of consciousness? Rose-colored
sheets softened the texture and tone
of her skin, and I saw my friend
through the skeletal frame of her dying.
#3
Through the skeletal frame of her dying
I couldn’t find her. Memory brought
her back to me. Once she asked if I believed
in life after death. She wouldn’t talk
about the cancer. She didn’t say
that this time she would die.
We sat on a bench in a concrete
park on the Upper West Side.
All she said was her husband now
realized they would not grow old together.
I felt the spritz of a light rain or drops
from an air conditioner several floors up.
She twirled a tea bag in her paper cup
but she did not look up at me.
#4
She did not look up at me.
Instead, she talked about her books.
She’d ghost written four,
none of them the one she wanted
to write. Help Me I’m Sad,
and Midlife Can Wait were the two
I tried to read, but her dust-ridden
hardbacks sat at the bottom
of my bookcase. Every year
I tried to throw them out,
topics now dated. Who
would read them. This year
I ripped out her inscriptions
saving the torn pages, tossing her books.
#5
After saving the torn pages, I tossed the books
into a dumpster. They aren’t her, I told myself,
and they weren’t. This need to make room
for more books I could not help. But
I have the frayed pages with her handwritten
notes to me in an envelope with her name on it
in a plastic box on my closet shelf.
All those years of convent school
when everything I owned had to fit into one
blue metal trunk taught me to parse out what I kept.
Every fall, it would move with me, until one year
when my mom said take everything you want.
I’m throwing it all out. I should have believed her.
My mother let go of two husbands and a house.
#6
Letting go of things is something I got from my mother.
When I divorced she told me I gave too much.
She always held a little of herself back. When she died,
there were no photos, no childhood mementos only
my bronzed baby shoes. My friend said take a dishtowel,
something she used everyday. Why, why keep the relics
from those we love entombed in a plastic box.
Once, in a guided meditation, I went so deep
I felt my soul rise from my body into particles
like dust in a shaft light. It startled me, and I sank
back into my flesh. It made me cherish
this imperfect composite of bone, muscle, brain --
borne in the embryo of sperm and egg
invisible nuclei that goad me to live.
#7
How this hunger goads me to live
when even now I see my own death coming.
Like any human fool I still live in my dreaming,
live also in memory of the young woman
I did not know I was. In a photo,
I am on a dock in Maine slouched
over a lobster roll, mayonnaise dripping
onto my bare legs. Where was my head that day?
On the odor of creosote-treated wood,
or on some lover who was eluding me.
I hope it was on the thick white meat
the soft texture of the roll, and the slap
of waves hitting the dock, a resplendent
sun moving west from our old coast.
Published in Platform Review 2020
The Ether
Hiking near the tree line, my spaniel
nudges the half-rotted carcass of a small bird.
Stepping through layered leaf piles
I call her away, but she hesitates,
enchanted by the little cadaver.
Startled by the whoosh whoosh woo
of the wind through maple and oak limb,
she sprints after me, ears flailing.
Energies: wind, wave, light –
who can discern one stirring from another?
Souls shunted through –
how many hover here?
Even the promise of summer sun
seems lost while my own dear dead
flit and dart about. Are you
among them, my friend?
Or do I hear simply the whistling
whorl from that other world.
Rupture
When elephants grieve they circle
the carcass, form a barrier around it.
The only sound is the slow
blow of air from their trunks.
As if the remains revealed a hidden text,
they touch it, pick up bones, caress them,
smell them. They run the tip of their trunks
across the lower jaw, tusk, and teeth,
the parts most touched in life. Sometimes
in their taut huddle they cover the corpse
with soil and vegetation, then leave it.
Other animals grieve – orcas, humpbacks,
dolphins, lemurs. One parrot spent nights
screeching on the bed of the human it had lost.
Who isn’t dumbstruck, animal or human,
by those wrenched from us?
We wander through ritual --
lit candles, flowered shrines --
our breath fitful.
With no bone
to guide us, no path to the one we’ve lost,
we’re left -- a relentless keening within.
Moonbow Elegy
For Linda
Waiting for the lunar rainbow,
sky not yet dark, she walks
the Cumberland Falls trail.
Water droplets of spray catch
the light from a full moon --
then the moonbow.
If he comes to her, he will be
in that pale light – not angel
exactly – but his soul to quell
this ache in her core.
When the moon clears the top
of the ridge, she lifts her camera
to the arc of white. Lunar light
too faint for the human eye,
her camera will catch the color –
red, blue, indigo, yellow. She waits
for some trace of him, while a mist
encircles her, shrouds her bare arms.
first appeared in Presence 2022 A Journal of Catholic Poetry
No Ordinary Time
So many dead and millions more infected
by the virus, we shelter in place, 51 miles
and one state away. On my way to meet you,
a black feral cat that sleeps under my car
sprints away. So fast, it’s down the rain drain
before my engine turns over and I put the car
into reverse.
Reverse is my life now
as if all damage can be undone.
For you, I sever my demons from our day,
render what I can from this late imperfect love.
With you, on the phone near midnight
a crossword puzzled together settles me.
Today it’s a farmer’s market. We walk along the spot
where the Lehigh and Delaware rivers pool together –
pick yellow tomatoes, zucchini, and white peaches
for me to bring home.
So much in this world beyond repair,
so much damage to undo, I feel the risk of us. And I think
of the cat’s sprint to stave off its inevitable fate as prey.
Once My Husband
for Robert Michael Merritt
He arrives at the bookstore
lilies ablaze on one arm, a cane on the other.
Haltingly he walks into a neon maze,
of books, calendars and a café.
His face scanning the aisles for me.
Married again with three children,
his MS progressing, he’s not the cocky
young man. He sits a bit off from the others,
face averted as I read. I’m nervous.
Back then, how the poems scared us.
Whenever I wrote, he’d come up behind me
offering juice or lunch, anything
to peer over my shoulder, to find
whatever wildness in me was on the page.
Even now, I wonder what might hurt him,
what I should hide. But later, when we have coffee,
he strokes the book cover, his hand gliding
over my name. He’s shy, but clearly pleased,
remembering fragments, people we knew,places we lived.
Awed by what falls away,
from the terrible mistakes we make --
I nearly burn my tongue.
