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Ars Poetica
After Jackson Wheeler
Because my mother's mother carried her Irish language
across a stormy Atlantic to St. Paul
Because my great grandfather who lived to be 100
sang in Irish as he bounced us on his bony leg
Because on the front porch of my grandmother's house
the cousins, all named Mary,
learned 100 names for green from rebel songs
Because I lived sixty years before I learned my mother's father
died drunk under the hooves of a horse he was driving
Because my cousin, Sheriff O'Connell, who took bribes
from Chicago gangsters, gave money to my widowed grandmother
Because when I read about him in St. Paul histories
I thought saint not sinner
Because my father's tiny mother came from Galway
with a family too full of priests and nuns
Because she loved to talk in the way of Irish women
over tea and toast at small tables
Because I grew up in the quotidian music of women's murmuring
close to the ground where the world begins
Because men were either silent or overbearing
I lived my girl's life with Ann of Green Gables and Little Women
the bus plying the Old Fort Road to school
became my Bridge at San Luis Rey
Because art and music were in the church
I thought beauty belonged to God
Because roots of my young astonishment
cling to my inner life like the pine cone-growing
even after fire, living scales
Because in the convent we were told to be silent
I picked up a pen
Because of my heart's homelessness
Because a poem waits for me to see it-
the way Monet's last painting
his exact pink and red primroses
waited for his uncurtained vision
Because love will not let go
Because words un-write as they are written
un-speak as they are spoken
Because my granddaughters
listen to my tales of trolls and beanstalks-
their eyes pools where words sink and grow
the way I once listened to the old ones
I do not want to die without writing
my watery unwritten universe.
from The Lifeline Trembles (Blue Light Press, 2014)
Palimpsest
If by truth you mean hands
shaping the vertebrae of stars
If by hands you mean oak branches
scratching the moon's face
If by branches you mean that sickle moon
lying on its side as if asking
If by moon you mean pillow, expectant
as we, fingers laced, walk dim streets
If by pillow you mean feather words
the breath of fasting lovers
If by words you mean answers
where the moon tilts on its side
like a burning blade
If by answer you mean bruised trees,
clouds, lights of a far-off city, or the way
your finger slides into my closed fist
trembling the lifeline, the way
your palms resurrect my breasts.
from The Lifeline Trembles (Blue Light Press, 2014)
The Gift
In golden midsummer cotton grass
I hunch behind a wind-dwarfed pine
to watch a female moose and her calf
high step from forest to shore.
She lifts her head, long ears twitch
as she inhales inhabitants of a wind
that blows my way so I stay hidden
in my human smell.
Mother and calf bend to drink.
The water, rusty with iron, lies still,
between clumps of reeds.
Liquid rainbows yield to lapping tongues,
flow in under velvet to become
marsh light in the eye of the moose.
I see the cotton grass let go.
Gathering, rising—the spirit of each waterhole
deserts its body to ghost over the marsh
like Christ on a church wall ascending.
I know salvation is not the blood of the lamb
but in the blood of a woman when her rivers flow.
In a room golden with morning and moose light
my children emerge from my dark waters.
I give them the river wide after thawing.
published in ASKEW
The Roaring
St. Paul Zoo, 1955
A tide of noise, animal screams
beat against my head,
rocked the popcorn wagon,
swallowed whole the fountain
spraying its water wildly up.
Seals barked in their pool.
Monkeys combed and combed
stopping to pick out nits.
I breathed in familiar must,
wet fur, urine, bleach.
I thought I was safe,
When the roar rose up again
full-throated, gnawing, scarlet.
When my brothers called,
Let's find the lion!
running to the far corner
that held his cage,
I refused, wanting nothing
of muscled litheness pacing
a tiny, hosed-down space,
raw meat scattered on the floor.
These days I drag a chain
of no's and not yet's,
but when my vision wavers
with distance, a drastic music
heard as through a wind tunnel,
if I could bellow yes like that
lion wave of blood-red fury,
my heart knows I would.
published in Miramar
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