Chrysse Everhart

Chrysse Everhart's poetry has appeared in Main Street Rag, Tickled by Thunder, Rapid River, and Independence Boulevard. She has received honorable mention in the annual New Millennium Writings contest, and was a prizewinner in the Trumbull, CT Arts Festival. She is a student in the Vermont College adult degree program and a member of Herwords, a women's writing group based in western North Carolina. She currently collects poems she finds in Elver Park on west Madison, where the resident hawks drop them from the sky.

Filling a Hole

One day while I was not home
the lot across the street became vacant,
staring faceless at my windows.

Like a tree about to become deadfall,
the old single-wide trailer had loosened at its roots.
Or like a ship that had weighed anchor,
it drifted away from the front porch
and the back stair that had been its moorings.
Or like a caravan departing an oasis,
it had become more compact,
as sheds, teenage sons, dogs, and tools,
tires, broken wheelbarrow, moldy tarps
were folded, bundled, corralled.

Afterward, there were no signs of the leaving.
The same smooth grooves and strip of grass
divided the driveway into three stripes.
The road bore no sign of strain.

Where the trailer had been a rusted metallic pit
in the treeline, my mind still faintly sees those walls,
but today, in the fresh light, flying through them:
birds.

 

* * * * * * * * *

He Might Never Know

I do not know what to call this
any more than I can name
the orange-purpleness of winter mountains
in the distant east as sundown creeps up them.

I cannot capture it in a snapshot
any more effectively than any one
has captured the grandiosity of canyons.
A calendar has rarely made me cry, and then,
the photograph was blameless.

I will not put it into a poem.
It would be cramped and uncomfortable there
or the words I've loved would burst and shatter.

I have not had the deftness to sculpt
or draw or paint it, but I might let the cat
walk across the page on feathered feet.

I am not about to sing it
or even to hum a few notes.

He won't reheat my cold leftovers
for his dinner. He pushes the pot
to the back of the refrigerator.
He might never know that I can cook it.