Bev Tappan

Category: Poems

All poems

  • MEMORIES: BON VOYAGE

    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.

  • MEMORIES: HELENE

    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.

  • REUTEMANN ROAD POEMS: ASPIRATIONS

    ASPIRATIONS

    How we long to excise peasant fat

    As Gloucester fishermen slice the cod,

    Lifting flesh cleanly off the bone,

    Sculpting ourselves to aristocratic

    Skeletons: ballet dancers under the skin.

    And wear our heart lines open to view

    Like silk-embroidered Persian shields

    Or manzanitas whose bronze branches,

    Coated with smooth-meshed capillaries,

    Have cast off the armor of bark.

    We dive into surf to be tossed and  tumbled

    By breakers and scoured on washboard sand:

    Bottles and granite together giving up

    The cutting edge, the obdurate mass,

    Emerging as sea glass and luminous gemstones.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: A PAUSE BY A POND

    A PAUSE BY A POND

    We stop to sit awhile beside

    Our pond, the asters to admire

    (The royal purple, not the white)

    And note the scarlet-turning sumac,

    Hoping we may hear the flap

    Of slow-descending heron wings

    Or hasty mallard putting on the brakes

    And ruffling up the water, though

    We know our watering hole’s too small,

    And yearly getting smaller, to attract

    A southbound flyer not at all

    Deluded by our wooden replicas.

    At least we may sight the shifting V’s

    And hear the goodbye calls of geese.

    The fall migration’s underway

    And only we must opt to stay.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: BUYER BEWARE

    BUYER BEWARE

    I marvel how the trunks of dead and dying trees

    Are garlanded in fall with poison ivy leaves

    Gladdening the eye and asking to be gathered

    To deck a table for a feast in autumn.

    As coral snakes beguile like harmless cousins,

    Just so were ancient reefs adorned with sirens,

    Caskets with resurrection lilies beautified,

    And cereals with powdered sugar iced,

    And no-down-payment mortgages entice.

    Glittering like gold is worthless pyrite.

    Caveat emptor still is good advice.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    THE SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    Barrel chested and brawny armed,

    The aged birch still stands

    Incongruous on the riverbank.

    They have fenced it in

    With posts and a metal chain

    To ward off scrambling kids.

    How many years did it take

    To put out all those limbs,

    One torn off by lightning

    Or by wind: the scar remains.

    It’s younger than the pines

    That sheltered shell diggers,

    But did it watch the big-sailed

    Gundalows barging bricks?

    It could not in its salad days

    Arrow skyward slimly straight

    But branched and branched again

    For what was near at hand.

    Hugely ugly, it calls

    Out to me.  It haunts my

    Memory.  It’s begging to be

    Made into a poem.

  • RECIPROCITY

    As plants breathe out and we breathe in,
    The earth is one gigantic lung:
    Flora supply our oxygen and
    We are the breath of life for them

    Water full of fecal waste
    To flowers is nectar they can use
    And filter all the poisons out:
    They drink it to our health.

    But wait! The air I breathe may
    Have been exhaled by Socrates.
    Pathogens from ancient plagues
    Linger on in kinder form.

    Noxious fumes from China
    Stir up asthma in California
    Inuits sing their melodies
    Into each other’s mouths.

    Here on our spaceship earth
    We share the finite air.

  • NORWICH YEARS: WINTER TRAILMAKING

    WINTER TRAILMAKING IN MT WASHINGTON VALLEY

    It’s the next thing to walking on water,

    Sinking snowshoes into drifts

    Of down almost out of sight,

    Lifting webbed feet easier than

    We thought but effortfully, white

    Ashes floating up like smoke,

    To take the next giant step

    On immaculate virgin territory.

    This cold day we see no  mouse prints,

    No trails of birdclaws like the tracings

    Of sandpipers playing tag with the tide,

    Only dents of icy missiles

    Windblasted into marble quilts.

    But look.  A raven evicted from pipe-frozen

    Flats above the treeline takes

    Lodging in a topless cage

    Of bare branches, querying us

    With raucous uncrowlike challenges.

    And by that wall a small red squirrel

    With straggly tail munches a pineseed

    Until we shift a pole and he

    Submerges into the briarpatch,

    Rockets up a hemlock and turbo-

    Drives across arboreal highways

    As silently as the beech leaves

    Flutter and scatter across the snow

    Onto our cross-stitched calling cards.

  • REUTEMANN ROAD POEMS: LOVE WITH OPEN ARMS

    LOVE WITH OPEN ARMS

    Isn’t that the song the sweet birds sing,

    Leaving empty nests like fruit on barren

    Winter trees?  Forget the crib and playpen,

    College choices and careers.  Feed

    Voracious appetites.  Push the young

    Off the edge.  Share the joy of soaring.

    As soon as you have seen them catch an updraft,

    Veer to the south.  Aspire!  Aspire!  Vacate

    Arboreal condos felled by passing winds,

    And leave the marble halls to earthbound types.

    Be vocal on the wing in wide migrations,

    Flying point or following with the flock.

    Our homes are fragile thatch.  Be briefly tenant.

    The air, the buoyant air, is our only element.

  • REUTEMANN ROAD POEMS: WILD GEESE

    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.

  • MEMORIES: LILLIE

    COMPLIANCE

    (for Grandma Lillie)

    White and wispy as spun sugar, her hair

    Is still damp from the rollers, our arrival

    Taking her by surprise.  She sits on her porch

    In the only aluminum chair left, her doll

    Legs dangling.  Gravity has collapsed her

    One inch for each calcium-starved disc.

    Now she says she has no neck and cannot

    Wear the gemstone pendants we have given her.

    She hadn’t thought it would come to this, her porch

    Bare of furniture and philodendron,

    Her plants twisting heart-shaped leaves for the neighbors.

    Her sister says the nursing home is pleasant.

    She doesn’t know what to expect.  She’ll take an African

    Violet with her and a rocking chair.

    She’ll try to bloom where she is planted.  Her voice

    Is thin as the top note on a harpsichord.

  • REUTEMANN ROAD POEMS: FAMILY HEIRLOOMS

    FAMILY HEIRLOOMS

    Jewels like fireflies fluttering

    In the shadows of spruce and cedar

    Are recollections of yesterday’s children.

    Out of the corner of my eye

    I see legs dangling from beds

    Heads disappearing down stairwells.

    I hear five siblings faintly

    Slamming doors or crying or

    Giggling in mossy clearings

    They leave things for us to find:

    A size-three sandal once

    Red under a brushpile.

    These children today live nowhere

    Until a marble rolls

    Out from under a radiator

    Or my brush tangles in the dog’s

    Bush like a comb in waist-

    Long shining brown hair,

    Or sitting on the couch with a book,

    Making mouths at me,

    My granddaughter crinkles her eyes.