Select Poems from Weather of the House (Sow's Ear Press)

Spring Garden

Something ate the cucumbers
and half the squash
but the peas are unharmed,
casting their lines up Hattie's fence,
the faint against the fixed,
and I keep upturning scraps of china
in the dirt, bone china and glass
but none of it whole.
Deeper down are larvae
held in the ground
until a stronger light unpearls them.
I hope to uproot all the ivy
and Virginia creeper nearing the bed
with its make-shift border of bricks,
but the vines grow while I sleep
finding holes everywhere.
Even the house has been entered.
This morning the rose petals
lay thick on the table
like curls severed from a child's head.



The Gardener

I haven't talked to you about
a dark space I dug up.
Clods and rocks I can pick out of soil,
blue-veined clay I can nourish;
weeds, yank up; shade, cut back.
But this

hollow where no seed is meant to grow
astounds. I go back to basics,
trusting my hands to find the dirt
as it always was, humid and maternal,
easily worked to hatch seeds,
but this

breach of earth voids every breathing
speck so that the spade of my hand
weighs more than death and the leaves
I touch are stillborn. Tell me,
must I keep tending, must I
turn this

blank into myself and vanish,
or is the hole an entrance
into some new ground that is yet
familiar, tilled and fertile, vast
as my loss, tenderly sown with
this?

Phoenix Feather

Rocking Emily in her dim blue room
her legs folded up to make her fit
her head wood-hard against my chest
her hair no longer the down I breathed
back when the dark behind the blinds
was a known street:
I balk at this bigness, this weight on my heart
asking for a song to make her sleep,
as if she could, in such an awkward chair.
She would have me give up my plans--a book,
a glass of tea--all for her whose body wants holding
the night, even as it grows like a field
and will swallow me whole the day my senses leave.

Morning Chore
(for Cynthia)

They said to quit my tears and get on with the spinning.
I wince seeing mother's quilt on the chair's back,
its trees of life all bent while threads sadden
in the pot by the fire and my hands twist flax.
"Someone tell this child her grieving time is done.
Tell her there's a hard winter coming, Lord knows."
I spit and twist to a memory of leaf showers,
mother flinging me into hills of gold and following
headlong to rise, her laughter bounding past fences
that mark off the wild, hair crazy with leaves,
the leaves of a quilt that covers me at night,
covers my secret body that goes on sprouting
though my heart desists, as wheels of sleep
spin stars and plumes, lilies, thistles, cat tracks:
emblems of wonder frozen at my waking.

(featured also in Words and Quilts, edited by Felicia Mitchell