Recollection poems
COLLAGE
Pieces of our shared past
Drift softly in my mind,
Flutter like shaking aspen
Leaves in the autumn wind:
Otters on the French River,
Haleakala’s silver swords,
Sea anemones aquiver,
Beaver woodcutters at work,
Red spires in Bryce Canyon,
Deer on a frozen lake,
A herd of honking sea lions,
Phosphorescence in our wake.
Shifting images coalesce,
Merge in a misty scene:
Bright moments of our happiness
Weave in a fading dream.
HANDS
They all called him handsome,
But it was not his face
I loved, though he was comely,
And his smile could erase
Any hint of gloom
That ever lingered on
In any darkened room.
It was his hands I loved,
Strong and long-fingered,
Hands that gripped an axe
With purpose and affection
To cut our yearly firewood,
Hands that drew the hoe
Between the beans and cornstalks
And arrowed our canoe
Around the foaming rocks
To where we had to go
To reach our evening campsite,
Hands that pounded tent stakes
To secure us for the night,
Loving hands that gave me
Memories of sweet delight.
Was it in the Sixties that I first heard
The doorbell ring on the first of May
And found your wildflowers at the door
Of that hillside house your father girded
With cedar logs and sturdy fieldstones
To keep our family sound and safe?
Fifty years later your “Free Spirit”
Roses arrive (I love the concept)
At my apartment, accompanied
By purple and orange tulips and green
Cymbidium orchids, as always on the First
Day of May, their Andean-colored cheer
Brightening up a rainy day
And warming my heart with a memory.
A BACKWARD GLANCE
From my car radio come the slow sweet strains
Of Mozart’s First Horn Concerto, and I am
Suddenly transported into that Victorian room
Where we made music, seated on the piano stool,
Hands on the black and white keys, my girl
Standing beside me easing the smooth tones
Out of her French horn, and I am aswirl
In waves of nostalgia, longing for that ample home,
Those five ripening minds, their patient Dad.
We did not know what signal bliss we shared.
We hurried forward through a sacred time
That my heart now cries out to live again.
(April 2014)
REFLECTIONS
In my mother’s mirror with its faux
Ivory, celluloid handle and backing,
I am looking for her, and I see some
Of her and some of my father’s face.
I ask myself why it is that I,
Their only child, should have striven
Always to differ from their prescriptives,
Always to escape their vigilant directives.
Was it the sound of my mother crying
Every Saturday night and emerging late
And red-eyed on Sunday mornings?
Or was it the summer she took the car
And we drove to her friend’s cottage in Hampton
For a week on the shore before we came back
To the boy scout camp my father directed
And they stared at each other while I watched?
Or perhaps I knew at my father’s funeral
To which his handsome, never-married waterfront
Director came, why his grief was greater
Than mine and why the siblings I longed for
Had never arrived. And so I determined
That my sons would have brothers
And my daughters would have sisters,
And their parents would be truly a pair.
So much does my mother’s mirror
Show me as I look for her face
And some of the face of my father
And find at last only my own face.
(March, 2014)
LAMENT
Where and when did it begin,
This call to me of the wild?
Was it the chatter of tanagers
Flitting in Amesbury pines
Waking a six-year-old child,
Or was it the dip and dip
Of my parents’ canoe paddles
In the Powow River north
Of camp on Tuxbury Pond,
Or when I looked up at trees
And hooked my hand on the smooth
Bark of birch and aspen
As I struggled up Mt. Chocorua?
Later I came to mourn
The hurricane’s blast, the pines
Strewn like tangled match sticks,
The scarlet tanagers gone.
Today as an octogenarian
It drives me wild to see
Our maples migrating to Canada,
Our Great Bay rank with algy.
UP AND DOWN PINE HILL
Face down on the Flexible Flyer,
Runners tuning up, a
Conveyer of tire-treaded snow
Trembling into motion,
My watery eyes slitted by wind
Singeing my nose and chin,
At the curve I slid onto unresisting air,
Exhilerated as a sky diver,
And thumped, breathless, onto the virgin drifts
Of a neighbor’s sunken garden.
In spring we wound on roller skates,
Turning butterfly keys until
Clamps tightened on shoe soles,
Tenacious as bulldogs. Then,
Head down and arms swinging, we
Herringboned up the sidewalk
And schussed down, knees bent,
Locomotive wheels clacking,
Hedges blurring past, decelerating
At last to a leisurely standstill.
Summers we stood on bicycle pedals,
Weaving drunkenly uphill.
Fall was leaves whispering underfoot as,
Schoolbags slung over shoulders,
We slogged through fungal fragrance
While peach and violet sunsets
Silhouetted the limbs of lindens.
I still love scrambling and
Panting up precipitous trails
Or jogging on snowshoes down.
GHOST TOWNS IN NORTH WALES
We walk in upland dales past roofless towns.
The wind off glowering crags is
Muffled by slate fence rows: mansized
Slabs ragged from edge to edge,
Planted in soil too thin to bury the dead.
These blue-black panels, weathering grey,
Echo the softly slurring gutterals
Of short and sturdy dark-haired Celts:
Miners who with their wives and children
Walked these paths some forty years ago.
Their boys at twelve did not join boy scout
Troops but took their futile candles
And six-foot iron drill rods
To brave the brimstone depths they’d
Long been warned about by chapel preachers.
Each night they hurried out for a wash
And supper and choir practice, that
Other world that kept them sane and literate
Along with lunchtime meetings where
Roberts’ Rules governed debates.
Empty now are the slate caverns. Vandalized
Is the manager’s house in the grove.
Open to wind and hail, the miners’ homes
Welcome the chimney swifts while
Waiting for men who never returned from war.
We point binoculars at hardy sheep
Cropping the mountain meadows:
Their lambs are radioactive since Chernoble.
A wagtail showers himself
In acid rainfall blown here from New York.
PAW PRINTS
My hand recalls the hard curve
Of his skull and the pull of the wire brush
Through his coarse tail. Big Mick
Was a rock hound who nosed up
Smooth stones to cradle in his jaws.
He swam endless laps in the pond
Towing a small boy. He barked
Into the water to scare the fish.
His wolf eyes beamed us down the drive.
He danced his welcome up the steps.
Vacuum cleaners were fair game.
New ice at the edge of the outlet
Shattered under his paws. Snow frosted
His muzzle. His tracks in the woods, enlarged
Like Big Foot’s, soon will be melted.
(Reutemann Road poems 1960-1972)
BON VOYAGE
Three burials in three months:
We socialize over your funeral coffee.
Sisters, you have left the party early,
Set your atom particles swirling
And abandoned your good books,
Flower gardens and canoe trips,
Spinning off children, husbands and pets.
And so I plan the mode of my departure:
Not to be draped in black tapestry
Inscribed with a white six-pointed star,
Or canopied in satin spattered by rainbows
Sifted through stained glass windows,
But taking a long view of the memorial
Service through the wrong end of a telescope.
My bones already oxidized and glowing,
I will pinwheel into Van Gogh’s Starry Night,
Hitching a ride to the nearest galaxy.
The coral shells I leave behind
Will fertilize another crop of beans
Or drift in sun-filtering mists
Onto the fossil seas of the White Mountains.
AN OVERDUE NOTE
(For Helene)
All right, Helene, here is a poem
About our salad days as wives
Of graduate students, housed in adjacent
Twenty-foot trailers next to the
University stadium. “On Wisconsin”
Energized our weekends. Saturday mornings
Over cups of coffee, I asked you
What it was like playing clarinet
In Phil Silver’s All Girl Orchestra,
And envied the separate vacations you
And your husband took to visit relatives.
You tried to make me read Karen
Horner, for whom I think you named
A daughter. You were the first and most
Liberated woman I’ve known. We’re talking
Now about the forties. You asked me how
I grew my hard shell. I counted all
The closed doors in my parents’ house.
When we had children, your four,
My five, your milk and affection
Flowed like sap. You were not
Strict about toilet training. You
Were as self-fulfilled as a redwood
Sheltering sprouts. They tell me when
You died of breast cancer, you made
The parting bearable for all your brood.
You were always ahead of me, Helene.
WILD GEESE CROSSING
My Lord, what a morning! The clothes
Flap in my face, stiffening as I pin
Them on the crusted line. Pine branches
Toss snow all over the patio.
Across the cobalt blown-glass
Bowl of sky between the house
And the mountain, a wedge of geese
Have etched themselves arrowing north.
Like squeeze toys they eject staccato
Cries in the wind’s swelling fist
That drift down to our ears, tinny
As the notes of tongs on toy xylophones.
Forty years younger I stand
In a college classroom, teaching assistant
To a gaggle of World War Two veterans
Bickering over the symbolism of wild geese.
Take your notebooks to the marshes and the mountains
I should have told them. Set your sights
For the next four decades and then write
The message of spring and fall migrations.