Category: Memory
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Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse, graying outbuildings. In your final winter, you stood with empty, cracking branches to tell us plain that your kind shade would be gone – My father, too, would warn us so in his gruffled, dying voice to give us time to account, to record, to not be frightened. Empty sky. Time unwinds. I…
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And our longings will meet
coming in the house with sand between your toes or mud covering your boots, you may pause by my old needlepoint and long for vague days cradled in my arms, singing on your father’s shoulders, woods, dunes, day dreaming on long highways, prairie, corn stalks clicking by
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The hill faraway
The hill stands innocent as it always has – empty now, or perhaps drowsily crossed by weekend strollers. What is left of you there, your fellow soldiers: the mud of your steps, blood melting the snow? I breathe in here, where I am now, and wonder if walkers there breathe you in. I ask if…
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The history of my way through water
Does water remember as I make my way across her on this diagonal again? I clear a wake, paddles’ light splashes, this side, then the other. She self-heals in a moment or two, yet I wake-splash on. Tomorrow it will be the same – me launching out, she self-healing. I like to think she takes…
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Geraniums (revised, again)
It begins with the scent of geraniums, bitter and hard, and my grandmother telling me not to touch because she is afraid I will pick them. I wonder how this flower so harsh on my nose could be the crown of her patio. It begins with the scent of geraniums, bitter and metallic, and the…
Poems from in between 