TO
EMILY BRONTE
Eleven
years old and sunk in the red velveteen
chair at the Fox Bay Theater, I absorbed
the raw sculpture of Penistone Crag,
bracken and gorse, the peat
blanketing the Yorkshire moors. Heathcliff
with his sea-green eyes, black cape swirled
around him, how tall and alarmingly
handsome he looked.
At Catherine’s grave he cried, you wrote:
I cannot live without my life,
desire held hostage in his eyes,
my
heart held stunned in my chest.
Years later, I return to your words;
travel to the stone-
flagged floors of your home;
your desk-box saved under glass,
its lining worn, purple velvet
splotched with red sealing wax.
Walking the rocky footpath towards swells
of purple heather, I remember the words
of the local stationer who saw you
returning one evening: her countenance was lit up
by a divine light. I imagine
I hear your skin
brush mine, whisper what you know:
the silence, the stars
that burn through the page.
Hone the hours to their core—you might have said—
wind and poem, passion and moor.
from We
Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon
Poetry)
CROCHETING IN AUTUMN
I wanted
the silence of yarn,
the hook, shining
movement
of gold, in
and out, the skeins unravelling
at
my touch.
I would be Penelope, undoing
her
work each night, so as never
to reach the end of
this
wool under my hands,
sprawled on my lap
and
becoming
goldenrod, aster,
marigold,
the plot of flowers
behind my grandmother’s grave,
the
sun that floods childhood
and all Septembers,
the
maple leaves falling
where my grandmother lies.
from Yaya's
Cloth (Iris Press)
CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE
with
thanks to William Stafford
I live
and write inside
this motherskin.
On
good days, words beach up
like starfish splaying new arms;
my child laughs beside me.
Amber
speckles her wide brown eyes--
a mural of lost mammals
whose leaps I can believe in.
Appeared
on the e-zine Blue Fifth Review.
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