Don't Look Here For Lines And Meters

Don’t Look Here for Lines and Meters

My poems are measured by the meter of the heart,
The rhythm of seasons.
If you count the lines between the spaces,
They probably won’t be even.

Perfection doesn’t ride on my lines.
My lines tangle like nerve jangles,
Are woven like a fisherman’s net.
The voice breaks with the weight of lead sinkers,

And iridescent scales shining in the sun.

Planting Christmas Trees

Planting Christmas Trees

Rows of little pointy trees,
Hundreds of ‘em under an August sky.
Push the spade into the
Tough sod,
Showing a dark wedge of earth,
Then plunk one in
And press it down snug
With your boot.

They have the best view here;
Looking over the mountains
Toward blue and bluer.

They’re gonna be chopped off like cabbages
But they don’t care,
They just spread out
Those spidery roots,
And take a drink.
Reach up those little spruce fingers
To the sky,
And settle in,
Tasting sun.

Tipi Kitchen

Tipi Kitchen

Rumford tins
And herbal teas,

Ball jars, grain, honey,
Olive oil and spices

On a plank shelf—
Blackened pots and fire-pit,

Earthen teapot, jugs of spring water,
Crickets, and the wind in the trees.

The Ride

The Ride

In March the wind knocks
From the night its low
Train mourn
And the house shakes
Until the stove pipe
Rattles its rusty teeth
And I hang to the edge
Of my bed for the bucking
Ride into spring;
Not the spring of your dreams
But a common nightmare
Of trampled woodpiles
And mud, close cabin madness,
Waking from hibernation
Wearing stiffness,
Thumbed seed catalogs
And a hunger for
That slice of green,
A tonic for the bitter kernel
Resting at my liver.

Mountain Home

Mountain Home

That husband I left gave me Ripton.
This farm daughter of the wide Champlain Valley
Had viewed mountains from afar.
To be sheltered by them was womb-like.
Living there,
I knew I’d be caught
In shadow.

To swim in the dark eye of the mountain
Was a baptism.
Numbness to everyplace before.
Nowhere so cold, but cleansing,
Like a spring storm cleans the woods
Of weak bones.

My new allegiance
Fought in driven forays,
Falling down the winding road to the valley
Again and again.
Always coming back,
Uphill.

You know Who You Are...

You Know Who You Are

I stand at the gate of the high-school
Nordic race and my mind is reeling after
Overhearing an aside from the guidance
Counselor to a star parent.
“I didn't know he had it in him.”

My son. Sixteen and lanky.
A junior with falling grades.
He works late nights as a cook and I,
The welfare mom, work two part-time jobs,
A full-time student and mother of four in
A house with no running water.

I stand there with a taste of gall on my bitten tongue,
What do you know of spirit and sacrifice,
Of small, desperate Christmases where the children's
Forgiveness is the gift in the darkness?
And his father lies somewhere mixing alcohol
With antidepressants, lost in a post-Vietnam Era fog.

And I am the ache in the throat of sorry
For a boy coming into manhood alone but
For the kind-hearted coach he runs for,
Breathing the frozen air on the mountain,
Skating free.

Someday I'll come out of the closet of poverty where
Dignity is silence and a woman stands alone;
Cold-footed and invisible in a dark coat
With ripped pockets where her red-tipped
Fingers pretend comfort.

To The Equinox

To The Equinox


Slow spring,
Shy in your youth.
Peeping crocus tips.
But watch out…
Sun and green,
Blossoms,
Song and giddy mating dance.
Earth quickens with you
And there’s no stopping
Your gaudy, bawdy fertility
Rites.

Homer Noble Farm

Homer Noble Farm

I heard uncle Homer never bought what he could make
and he could make about anything.
The pipeline from the spring was a wooden trough
as were the eve spouts on the house.
Every bent nail was straightened.
Nothing was waste.

In his way, Homer Noble was a poet.
A poet of sparsity, words
pondered over and spent like saved change.
The bare kitchen, floors scrubbed,
glass clear to catch all the daylight
woodstove near the center.
Fine cut maple split to size,
small for a quick hot fire,
whole for a baking.

The farmer and the poet worked the same land,
Frost in his cabin with words
of bitter irony and Noble running
the farm on the slant of light
across the field and the tough, clever hands,
making do.

Trilliums

Trilliums

On a March day
I will walk where
the trillium root
lies under the snow
with its thread of truth
to be found in a
galaxy of holy trinities.


At the clock’s turn
the cock will crow
with new blood,
seeing the sky open
over red budded hills
and light will enter the land
again like a savior
risen from the grave.

Silly Talk

Silly Talk
(on finding a typewriter in the dump that sounds like a train and shakes the table and skips to letters of its own choosing… the tone of the poem seemed to remain the same.)

When you tring my neeps,
Coloreas flig over our
Symbiocitys,
Bringing nuncies to lippits,
Tasty lubbins just right for
Spritidem and suplimy blibs.
Oh, ah, nuferitzen and crystiosom,
Peaceful endsing to a moomie fey.

When The First One Left

When the First One Left


That night
I slept with your T-shirt.
It smelled like you, sweat and peppermint soap
And boy and dog and pizza
And beer and spruce gum.
That night the bus took you over
Bridges and through tunnels
And cities streaming light
And smoke and noise,
West and west as far as
The land would reach
Away from the Green Mountain
Forest and me.
I wondered if you ate the lunch I made and
If it was another good-bye.
I slept with your T-shirt
And in the morning I washed it.

Wishes

Wishes

I wish I were silverfish thin enough
To slip between the sheets of your dreams.

I wish to see again the
Fingertips of popples,
Swelled pink in the fresh light,
Cloud-shrouded light,
Bouncing off dead snow.

Before the leaves began
Winking, you twisting
At your stem,
Before the fall,
Twirling to land upon a bed
Of forest mould,
Staring at a blank sky.

Photo

Photo

The overalls are unbuttoned at her sides.
Her lips smile but not her eyes,
Her belly holds a fourth child
In the late summer of her bearing.
She feels the moving and is full of wonder—
Still—after all.

Winter is breaking.
Squatting under the moon in the snow
She sees the first blood and holds
The knowledge for three days until
The child comes forth after the storm.
Ravens hang on the bright clouds.

Wouldn't You?

Wouldn’t You?

If someone threw a twenty-oz straight
Claw hammer toward you in anger,
Wouldn’t you flinch?

Even if you were on a step-ladder
Holding up a rough-lumber 4X8
With splinters in your hands and
Your arms shaking with the weight..

And six months pregnant besides
So your balance isn’t great though
He says you are clumsy anyway
And not co-coordinated at all.

And when you fall off the ladder
And the rafter lands on your back
And he doesn’t move to help you
Wouldn’t you feel bad?

But if your two cousins were visiting,
And stood there looking quiet and big-eyed…
Wouldn’t you not cry,
And wouldn’t you get up
And say “time for a break” and fix cocoa

And crackers and bounce your two-year-old
On your knee while the blood trickles down
Your back and cools sticky against your shirt
And your husband stomps out, angry
That the work is interrupted?

Years after and after when his callused fingers
Slide down the curve of your back
To the hollow where the tiny knotted
Scar sits on your spine, and he asks,

”What’s that?” you are silent
And move so that he forgets the question
Though he’s asked before and you never said,
And you remember when his hands were supple
And he would’ve waited for your answer…

Later, in the dark, alone beside him,
You’d let all those warm tears, slip out silent,

Wouldn’t you?

Memory

Memory

My mom was a singer
And a rocker of babies.
She knew what I needed.
A smile from deep
That crinkled her eyes,
Lessons in making bread;
The feel of the dough
Warm, pliant, smelling of rise.

When I had the cat dreams
I’d crawl into bed with her,
That body a safe landscape;
Curves and slopes,
Soft rises and mysterious canyons.
To hide in the wing of her arm
Was a time of warm, of full.

Cold mornings we’d stick
Our feet in the oven of the wood stove.
Forget school and the hard edges
Of buildings and frost.
We’d read and smile sneaky smiles
And rock, living on
Natural time.

How A Pagan Dies

How A Pagan Dies


When I go with death on my last day of the sun’s turn...
On that day I will lay down my pain on the forest floor,
Never to have it again.

All my sadness will fly away with the wind and become rain on deserts.
My sins will turn to stones and tumble clean in the river.

My blood will be as fire, licking the night bright.
My bones fall to ashes and dust and lime the soil sweet.

My thoughts will become light between the branches of trees.
And my words will lie on my children’s tongues, telling stories.

Vermont Cold

Vermont Cold

My father was fostered out at eight,
A farm worker, milking cows by hand
In the cold cracks
Of mornings and dusks.

They watched every bite
And valued the horses more
Though he was whipped equally well.
He swallowed the silence
And saved for a getaway bike.
Simply pedaled away
And someone kinder took him in.

He forgave the ill mother,
Eight brothers and sisters,
The father with a bottle,
Potato soup and greens
Against the hard labor.

He has only a little bitter streak,
From the meanness,
It’s very thin though,
Like a wavy line of rusty iron
Through gold.

Adaptation

The river wound about the foothills,
it flowed over rocks and slid lithely
through its high wild banks with brambles and branches reaching
toward her middle where the water was deep and silent.
Late summer haze yellowed the cornfields and hay stubble.
Goldenrod spears nodded to bees.

There was expectancy; perhaps that summer would end,
but that air was nebulous in the heat.
The only sounds were crickets whose rhythm was so subtle
in it’s seeping as to be no more apparent than breathing.
And the call of a blackbird from his reedy perch.

Fields and rivers I’ve always known,
and the line of mountains showing blue in the distance.
I’ve come late to hills, to the talking of trees,
the stone heart of the mountain.
Summers are short, and fall rusts and bleeds before the white of frost.
Lying nights awake, the darkness presses.
I hear trees cracking frozen as though their backs were broken.
The river is silent under her green ice.

Now I am the keeper of the fire.
I feed tree’s bones to the black and wait for spring.