Tag: poetry

• Trying to make out the words carved into an old garden wall dug up in my backyard

  The river no longer passes here regardless how I ask, I am left to find my journey in this dark soil. Or The river no longer passes here regardless how I pray for it to return — I ache for its filthy banks. Or The river did not announce it would no longer pass here…

  Jenifer

  January 31, 2015

  Aging, Chicago, Garden, Muse, Nature

  poetry

• The dying thoughts of a poet from Gorham’s Cave

  I do not know what I should expect you to come to know as you unwrap my bones and the tissues of my belongings. I carved this mark for you, no one else, hoping it would make me known to you. But when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shines once more, it will be…

  Jenifer

  January 22, 2015

  Aging, Ancient, Cro-Magnon, Dying, Memory, Muse, Poem sampler

  poetry

• On reading “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang by Li Bai (Li Po)”

  Thinking of my old home and garden, I break into a hundred thousand shards of mirror, not quite identifiable, but not yet lost. They lay there blinking partial, shifting images as the moon paces above in its forgetting path. Shall I piece them together? Is it time? Is it possible? I am sunk. If I…

  Jenifer

  January 19, 2015

  Aging, Childhood, Dying, Family, Fantasy, Meditation, Memory, Muse, Pentwater

  poetry

• Jackson Heights, 1982

  i It is time to write to you, I realize looking up from a book as my husband tells me we are running late. But you are long gone, familiarly gone. Is it a defense mechanism to say that we never should have been friends, me with my Cloisters and flannel pjs, you with your…

  Jenifer

  January 6, 2015

  Aging, Chicago, Dying, Friendship, Memory, Poem sampler

  poetry

• My window at night, more

  Slow moving, a partial dream unwinding in its own way, we slow down, we slow it down, make sure we see — look, here, now, it passes — open it, to understand, to isolate the exact point, and how, the smooth releasing shifts into jarred, frayed, jagged. We go in there, at that point, slow…

  Jenifer

  December 27, 2014

  Art, Meditation, Memory, Muse, My window at night, Yoga

  poetry

• Another poem about a rose

  It hangs there still in the cold December air having bloomed late, and now unable to set seed. I had thought it a thing of hope when it first bloomed, white, stubborn. The dog does not follow me downstairs at this hour, her joints sore, orientation off. Alone in the gray night, uncertain in the…

  Jenifer

  December 8, 2014

  Aging, Dying, Garden, Nature, Poem sampler, Seasons

  poetry