Selected Poems

Selected Poems from “Do We Ever Stay?”

Christmas Songs

I listen to those Christmas songs
playing in the doctor’s office
in the stale days before the new year breaks.
Let’s have done with frenzy, ribbons and the miles
between then and now, between them and now.

The year sags, the hammock of winter
holds aching bones, curved spine.
I can think only of champagne catching the tree lights
through the Millennium goblets I bought in Ireland
it seems a thousand years ago.

The sparkling wine rushes the forehead
to welcome the new days.
Children’s voices move away,
piano keys grow silent, suitcases are packed full.

Do we ever stay?
The new daylight goes unnoticed.
The swimming pool lies under its moldy, canvas top.
Faded poinsettia leaves, brown over white,
struggle into a February that sees
roses bend their necked stems in silent death throes.

Did I just hear another Christmas carol
pressed like a dead petal within a television jingle?
Why don’t we let it go?
A little girl, a stranger,
now strikes the keys of my family piano
that I had to leave behind.

I saw the piano move down an angled plank
and up another into the van,
Was my mother watching also?
The years of Christmas carols
trailed behind, as the truck
moved down the summer road.

The Kitchen

It was a different room,
when I came back,
smell of mold, the broken dishwasher
still unemptied after 30 years.
I didn’t belong there, and it didn’t
belong to me.

What I came back to was a new space,
new and ancient, so old
it seemed it had never
felt Neuman’s ghost
standing in front of the refrigerator
on his funeral day.

The kitchen so old I had never gazed out the window
at an early October snowstorm,
watched my daughter hold a cat by its haunches,
saw the summer kale itching to be picked.

The room didn’t welcome me.
Soon, dishtowels draped chair backs,
the toilet broke,
and at the tag sale in the driveway,
I found the plaster cast of the hand
I had made in kindergarten.
Heartline severed, one flayed branch
heading off to the north, one to the south,
never meant to catch love
in its palm.

Broken heartline always heading away
to strange rooms.
Me, the spirit, packing up, unwelcomed.

Boulanger’s “D’un Vieux Jardin (of an old garden)”

We hear a friend play the piano
against a windowed gray sky.
We look at the branches of large trees
holding the solid gray in their limbs.
We crane our necks to see a
pattern against the bleakness.

Can you hear the green gardens of Rome,
endless sun and fountains splashing with water?
The notes rise and rise, buoyed by dancing measures
and large green leaves.
Then, just unable to stay afloat, the notes fall
past the garden’s marble cherubim, pot-marked by the years,

The girl, Boulanger, would die four years
after writing the music.
She, dead against branches cutting a solid gray sky
into pieces.
My friend plays her notes that hold
the hope of laughing water,
children running circular paths in the garden.
The music vaults higher and higher,
before cascading with the rainwater
that has bathed this land all spring.

Our misting faces turn upwards,
then down to the piano keys.
Each note rises to the branches,
holding the sky for sun.