Poetry

Smoke

Both golden hours heaved themselves into the meeting room

adding supernatural aspirations to smoke from a bad flue

Hazy auras blue around the mourners

Slow for deer

Outside October crisp, roadsides festooned with the squash

colors of maple and beeches: persimmon, which doesn’t grow here

cinnamon paprika coral vermillion, only autumn color to us

Yellow fingernails of mulberry confetti-fresh on the duff

Who wouldn’t want to die in the fall?

Cider fog swirls in the marsh

Headlights sweep across the cattails

Slow for deer

Slow for the crossing over

Obsolete windbreaks crumble into the foundation of a tired barn

We are all so tired

except the children, one blond body with 20 arms and legs

innumerable questions

A tree, a lake, a playground

sobbing laughter, stranger hugging

Food escapes from the kitchen in tiny hands

Slow for deer Slow to leave

to make his memory last

smoke that lingers in a sweater I won’t wash

Thicket

I could look to the internet to find synonyms for bramble but that

would avoid painful remembering of the neighbor’s rose bushes, the

tar paper cowls they wore all winter, prickers, of trudging home

from Itchweed Park covered in burrs and sticktights, hours picking

them off the dog who at least had short hair. Some were spiked

planets; some sea urchins. We stuffed milkweed silks into our

pockets because they were the antidote. We never knew thistles

kissed our socks until we got into the light. Summer brambles tore at

our play clothes in the raspberry fields; barberry bushes on either

side of the walk caught us in their stiff bristled arms when we fell

from our bikes. Our limbs cross-hatched with evidence of our

explorations. We read Briar Rose before bed with inside knowledge

and slept in a house covered with euphorbia. Tender rampion grew

next door. That was not our destiny.

Greed

I want the golden apples of the sun and silver apples of the moon left

at the gate in a twig and vine basket woven by my grandchildren in

Montana. If the hunger is real and deep in me, and the apples too

perfect or not ripe enough, I want to catch the old rainbow trout while

the kingfisher glares and release it while he watches. Apples

gleaming call me from the dock. Whole. They fight the knife around

their curves. If the peel curls off in a ribbon, you won’t die an old

maid, my aunt said. Applesauce sputters over the fire, spitting

accusations and insults. The devil in me pours in red hots. I want to

feel something. The trout jumps for a mayfly. The kingfisher’ black

eye predicts the trout’s whereabouts. Applesauce slops out, neither

silver nor golden, but blush now. Splash and flapping of wings.