Tree Spirits
The clouds overhead today
are black as coal,
and the wind
is threatening.
I’m gathering blueberries
with the baby on my hip
when we both hear it
the slow,
steady creaking
of the branches above.
She points up,
and I politely ask,
Are the tree spirits speaking today?
If in the darkness
I found them
I wonder what the light
will bring
If my empty cup
found water
I am interested to see
who my full cup
will meet
Who will water the garden?
Who will speak good spells over me?
I wonder,
who will take the extra time
to love and know me.
I wonder who sees it’s worth it
to hold my hand as I sleep.
Who will plant the garden,
and walk through it with me?
Who will meet me in the sunlight,
and help me plant the seeds?
Who shits?
She shits.
She shits in a she-shit shed.
She shits in a bucket.
A bucket?
Fuck it.
Shit in a bucket in a she-shit shed.
Grandpa and eight-year-old
play pitch for the first time.
Baseball bleach white
fresh from the store.
Grass green,
breeze steady.
Grandpa in heaven
Always wanted to do this with his daughter.
Too high strung,
would get angry if the ball wasn’t thrown
right where she wanted it.
Always ended in raging and tears.
Grandson a flexible
easy going partner
Never gets mad,
never impatient.
Grandpa savors the long-desired moment,
then finds himself grieving for all of the missed opportunities
with the generation in between.
Being poetically misunderstood
comes with the metric.
So my poem about my
grandpop and sweet canned
peaches is thought sweet
and it is, but sticky rather than
Ripe. I meant to contrast
an unimportant grandson’s recollection
of syrup and fruit with an
unloved son’s
memory of meanness.
Mostly I meant to mourn how we are
reduced to almost nothing, a
pastiche of peaches, 93 years and all
we retain of the man
I called grandpop is an
image of sweet liquid with a
faint metallic
aftertaste.
The geese drift in the breeze above the gilded lake
The beef sits in the freezer under the wilted cake
The creek drives by the bees on the way to the wake
Our cheeks burn red by degrees when riding the brakes
We ease our keys in the lock; we beg: do not forsake.
The pelicans dance over the beach
Sandy wings dusting my sun hat
Tipped low towards the reaching waves
The foghorn breathes over raucous water
clumsy in its pursuit to touch the land
fueling those reaching waves
cardinals light above the deck
Kentucky red in a seaside town
their wings tipped low towards the reaching waves
Today is the anniversary
of Little
Girl with Popsicle.
It happened by the lake,
eleven years ago–
she was there,
and then she wasn’t.
The Last House on Needless Street, by Catriona Ward
I’ll crack open my head
right goddamn now
and you’ll see
the lightning bugs
burst into the twilight.
My mind is full
of intermittent fire.
I’d rather gently
blow steam
in the shape
of a dead bur oak
than belch flames.
The lightning bugs will
take over the neighborhood,
twinkling like lighthouses
on distant cliffs,
or stars calling
for other stars
to drift over, to start
a constellation
that looks just like
a screaming antelope.
Oh dear
I seem to be swinging
like Mercury—a year
in a few days, back and forth.
Yet I am as in control
as a hearth can be, just
a mason jar full of grass
with holes in the lid.
Rainy, rainy, thank you, thank you
