by Wendell Berry

Imagine that you had a dishcloth
Bigger than the one mothers put on the bread
To slow its cooling, that you could spread
Over the whole kitchen floor to bring up its face
As clearly as the features on the cake.

find the rest here.

One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

continues here.

My mother loves the salty mud of estuaries,
has no need of charts to know what time
low tide will come. She lives
by an arithmetic of moon,
calculates emergences of mud,

waits for all that crawls there, lays eggs,
buries itself in the shallow edges
of streamlets and pools. She digs
for chaetopterus, yellow and orange
worms that look like lace.

She leads me where renilla bloom
purple and white colonial lives,
where brittle stars, like moss,
cling to stone. She knows
where the sea horse wraps its tail
and the unseen lives of plankton.

My mother walks and sinks into an ooze,
centuries of organisms ground
to pasty darkness. The sun
burns at her shoulders
in its slow passage across the sky.
Light waves like pincers
in her mud-dark hair.

By Anne McCrary Sullivan from Ecology II:Throat Songs From The Everglades at WorldTech Editions. This week Poetry Friday is hosted by Wild Rose Reader.

by Bridget Pegeen Kelly

My father said I could not do it,

but all night I picked the peaches.

The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.

I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.

How many ladders to gather an orchard?

I had only one and a long patience with lit hands

and the looking of the stars which moved right through me

the way the water moved through the canals with a voice

that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering

and those who had gathered before me.

I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,

all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands

twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,

all night my back a straight road to the sky.

And then out of its own goodness, out

of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,

and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses

just after it has been rung, before the metal

begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.

The light came over the orchard.

The canals were silver and then were not.

and the pond was–I could see as I laid

the last peach in the water–full of fish and eyes.

From Poets.Org

The gate single-hinged wide open like a mouth

Still guarding the path to the jetty that runs

Between river, sea

Large rocks piled high, gaps filled with bits of shell

White as bone crowding gangs of anemones

Where it ends curtains of rockweed thick as hair

Slick, glass bottle green

Waves rush, slither like rivulets off  black stone

Carve gentle crescents in gray sand that  high up

Is powder dry in the scorching heat,  below

Shines a mirrored glaze

Water breaks light to mosaic shards sharp in

Her eyes, tired, red and dry like cellophane

Burnt by the sun and the salt and the sound of

The waves constant roar

04.15.09

* * * * * * * * * *

04.13.09

Pool

From the gate

we walked up

the rutted road.

The woman in a

county uniform

talked about

undergrowth,

deadfall and

salmon carcasses.

I’d seen a chinook

earlier, much bigger

than the sockeye.

He swamped them as

he slithered through

the riffles.

Fog burned off.

Water dripped

from lichen

in the trees.

A shadow passed,

over then back.

A hawk, hunting.

It’s here she said,

pointing.

I stepped up

the narrow trail,

looked down the

narrow fall of water.

The pool, an

open eye,

bright turquoise,

in the shadowed rocks.

* * * * * * * * * *

04.12.09

The Dogwood offered an escape

I was careful climbing out

The window, only used it twice.

In bloom, the pedals were thick,

Cream-colored, pink-edged

Soft as my brother’s bottom.

At night car lights flashed

Branched shadows,  patterns

Of rain drops along the wall

Behind my bed wide wake

Lying there waiting for sleep

Listening for the party to be over.

In July, after school was out

Twilight through the window

Awake again, late,  still light out

Sounds from older kids

In the Fry’s pool, laughing

The smell of a barbecue.

The windows are wide open

The air dead still, drenched

So hot I strip off my pajamas

The cool sheet a relief but I dream

My mother’s yelling “You’re naked!

You can’t sleep naked!”

In late September, walking to school

Kicking through dead leaves

That crumbly, sweet, dry,

Red-orange scent rising around us

Pops burning piles of them in the yard

Roving smoke, tears in our eyes.

Halloween, skeletal leaves

Skidder down the street

Running from house to house,

My little brother in tow

Streetlights dropping puddles of

Yellow on the sidewalk.

The witch’s house on the corner.

In winter cars buried to their windows

The squeak of snow, days off

The school furnace broken down

Dad not able to reach the office.

Pulling us up the hill

Down we’d go shouting.

Up and down endlessly

The dog barking the whole way.

Until cold, wet, exhausted

Trudging  home, joyful

The red front door gleaming

Bright in all that snow

* * * * * * * * * *

04.11.09

Flame
She remembered that time in the tub

splashing so fiercely they never noticed

the sting of the soap til his mom,

laughing, came in with the towels and

they both started to cry and she ran,

dripping, down the hall and down the stairs.

**********

On the trail in back of his house

Bets and the boys behind them trying

so hard to catch up and never succeeding.

At the cape, on the rocks

she was braver then he was but

he was funnier and better at drawing.

**********

High school hit them so hard they did not

know what to say other than a whispered hello

in the hallway except for prom night when

she asked him and they never even made it

through the door just drove and drove

heading to the port, to the sea.

**********

04.10.09

Light – a found poem

If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place,

a certain sense of privation is experienced.

If we look on a white,

strongly illumined surface,

the eye is dazzled, and for a time

is incapable of distinguishing

objects moderately lighted.

If we pass suddenly from the one state

to the other, even without supposing

these to be the extremes, but only,

perhaps, a change from bright to dusky,

the difference is remarkable, and we

find that the effects last for some time.

The cases here under consideration

occur oftener than we are aware

in ordinary life; indeed,

an attentive observer sees these

appearances everywhere, while,

on the other hand, the uninstructed,

like our predecessors, consider them

as temporary visual defects, sometimes

even as symptoms of disorders in the eye,

thus exciting serious apprehensions.

A few remarkable instances may here be inserted.

I had entered an inn towards evening, and,

as a well-favoured girl, with a brilliantly

fair complexion, black hair, and a scarlet bodice,

came into the room, I looked attentively at her

as she stood before me at some distance

in half shadow.

As she presently afterwards turned away,

I saw on the white wall,

which was now before me,

a black face surrounded with a bright light,

while the dress of the perfectly distinct figure

appeared of a beautiful sea-green.

From Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe.  This is one of my all time favorite books.  Of course Goethe was also a playwright and poet so perhaps this is cheating.

Goethe’s Theory of Colours from Google Books.

* * * * * * * * * *

04.09.09

Paradise

The engine’s steady low rumble

It is still light, one in the morning

Light layered with silver from

A rising moon on deck, silent

Three others watching, there is no way

I can sleep, afraid of what I’ll miss

Knowing that above us to the East

There are nothing but icefields

And the animals that live there

No human mark at all that I know of

And it’s such a relief, knowing

Thin sickle of beach, tangle of driftwood

Strands of falling water and at a distance

The blow of a whale

* * * * * * * * * *

04.07.09

Stones

Playing in the yard or in the house

She never heard them call her name

As if the strung together sounds

Called to some other child

A ghost girl more able, more loved

The names, the ones she found

On the beach or in the wood

She would pick up, carry home and

Hide in a box under the bed

To bring out at night in the dark

And pass from hand to hand like stones

A flat one the color of storm clouds

A round one the rust red of dried blood

They grew warm in her hands

When the time came to pack her things

And say goodbye she walked out the door

Did not hear them call to her

In the street she flung the names

Into the air like flowers

One settled into her hands

She kept it, savored it

* * * * * * * * * *

04.05.09

For Comfort

The forest he enters

A crow, no bird, watching

So softly in silence

He walks to the plain

———

A river, a ribbon

The rushes stand over

A willow, resplendent

And waiting for rain

———-

A heron flies over

Some folded enchantment

And dips to the water

To stand in the cane

———-

The man bound for chaos

Would settle for comfort

So turns to the forest

His path to regain

* * * * * * * * * *

04.04.09

Twilight/Midnight

Step out the back door.

A band of color between

horizon and sky.

Yellow fades to gray

gray to violet

violet to deepest blue.

Shadows pocket under trees.

Small birds settle.

A wind chime.

A cat returning home.

Turning, the sudden wash

of light, a rising moon.