THE february 2025 30/30 PAGE

Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.

The volunteer poets for February are Karen Arnold, Zoe Berger, Durin Chappe, and Christi Krug.

If you would like to join our alumni group of over 1,000 poets, apply here!

Day 10 / Poem 10

A-Dozen

My girls and I treasured
Fantasies of lighthouse keepers
Postmasters
The youngest novelist in the world
Supermarket cashiers
Books on braille and Morse code
Running fast enough to fly
Our interior worlds bursting
We tried for a long time, and hard

Hope cracks, then snaps
Crying at our day job is shadow’s work
Still the darker, fuzzier self remembers
Climbing and flying and being God

With “megrims” on the mind –
topic of research and researcher’s own plague –
the days begin bathed in blue light,
45 minutes of –
let’s call them –
The Blue Light Sessions of ’25.

Thence to more research.

For a brief moment there’s uncertainty 
about what the line graph depicts.
Could it be annual sales of anti-depressants
or the dogged progress of the 
New York Stock Exchange?
It’s a more prosaic chart of usage.

Because “megrims” is unused before 1708
it’s a necessarily upward-trending line
which takes it’s sweet time gaining currency
until mid-century and then bounces
like a sinker on a lake bottom
until the advent of the twentieth.

At which point, it staggers drunkenly upward in
a generally rising sawtooth of fits and starts.
Whether the subject is the cattle or human malady
it’s clear that the interest of the 21st
in “megrims” is paying handsome dividends.

All of which makes the researcher wish 
he’d gotten in on the ground floor.

“The producer’s purpose is to suggest some possible explanation
but not necessarily the only one . . . .”

                       In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy, 1976–1982

Spock, with ears pointing straight
up to smarter-than-everyone,
flashes the secrets. Tonight:
In Search Of Ghosts. I curl tight
in a green chair, a bud festering
in the light of the screen. Sticky-
fingered, I feed on spearmints
swirled like crazy cartoon eyes.

I feed on the words of a lady who
speaks from nude glossy lips just
as calm as the moms at school
sharing recipes in the parking lot.
Beehive hair, scarf, by a
bookshelf, a librarian telling
you what to read. Hands
still and at rest on lap of slacks.
A normal mother, not like
mine. Her eyes just the
right dark to light, not too much
of one or the other, not shining, not
peeled wide and glaring like
hard boiled eggs.

Mother screamed, Call the police!
Her head hurt and she saw
things that weren’t there.

Which is exactly what I’m
missing—the explanation.
Some things happen when
you’re very small that you
never can get at. Inter-
views could be helpful.
Cameras. Without flash.
The ghost story at
the icy core of what’s missing.

Dead fathers’ voices are
low and crinkly like sheets
in the bed at night. They
don’t rumble low and strong
like Spock. Mother trembles and
clings like a heavy blanket, like
a slow, thick, itchy cover pulled
over my head, shaking and
handless and stuck.

In the night, fingers of ice
prick, tap my shoulder
like this is all a game, like they
think I don’t know this is the
most terrifying thing that
could happen to anyone. And
I’m onto it, lying beneath
starched quilted cotton with
four pencil posts sharper than
anything I’ve ever used to
write my name and the date
at the top of the page. This
is terror, for sure, but I know
all about it thanks to Spock.

This lady’s husband died,
the next night she saw
the ghost. Shivery, shadowy, in
an icy room. Scientific-
ally, temperatures go low
in the presence of a ghost.
You can tell by the normal
eyes it’s all true.

Day 9 /  Poem 9

Decades
Summer days on Emerald Avenue
Post war, red brick bungalows
wide yards with cranberry trees
blossoming in the back yard

The summer my dad hauled home
six empty upright piano crates
fresh from a truck wreck, set them up
side to side in three rows wher
 we made rooms in a house
blankets, dishes borrowed from inside
spent hours reading, telling secrets
ate, relishing our exile

The first dance, pink lace dress
changing your idea of yourself
awkward at dancing but glad
to be held under crepe paper
streamers, drink fruit punch
Necking in back seats Friday 
as parents drove home from
Lansing’s roller rink after 10

Cars and boys at Dog’n Suds drive in
after school, with guys in cars swirling
donut circles winter nights on school 
playgrounds, Indiana State Dunes Park
running into Lake Michigan, Schwinn bikes
over two-lane roads hours and hours
The year a Dutch student rode his bike over
afternoons to talk and flirt, widen the world

Learning to smoke, packing for college
free after classes to do as you please
Directing a play in the studio Theater 
The Diary of Anne Frank in a perfect space
Meeting the love of your life in Shakespeare 310

Musical moan of whistle buoy
signals a riverboat’s push
through the narrow jetty—
as if movement is easy. Not
so for the shard of glass
in my chest wall, the spear
tip jutting from my t-shirt,
flash-frozen in the night.
With my failing near-
sight I feel the dread-cold
poised to break the skin.
If I ever learn to see through
this pain I will have my own
unfailing prism: color
after wonder after color.

Relax, I tell myself. Heaven is
trying to get here. Climbing down
rung by rung from burnished sun-
rise, wrinkling tussocky huckle-
berries with a chime of wrens,
tracing the hummingbird’s
loose loops touching this
blossom to the next in a baste
stitch across the hillside.

I’m missing some great secret
I knew five minutes ago or
five years ago or in another
moment when heartbreak
opened my portals to marvels,
when paralysis fled like
an exorcised demon and I
danced like a fool on a hill.

In a cavern beyond the
horror lodges a sob.
Insists it’s fine right
where it is; won’t come out for
anything. Cozy and sipping
warm stories, swaddled in
salt mists and false comfort.
If it unfolds, the angels will
recognize and welcome it home.

Day 8 /  Poem 8

For Mochiko

We sit
            Pandoras 
                        keepers of our honey vases, pithos
Blessing holders
            womb-shaped cornucopias of
                                    mysteries: breath, birth, death, rebirth

 Holders of boxes
                        languages, rituals, memories
                                    desires, delight, spinning of dreams
                                                sense the year empty just now before us
                                                            hands lightly resting or cradling lids

We claim our pasts
            solemn acceptance
                        accept the feast to settle tomorrow
We embrace wholly
            the land of kimonos
                                    pattern, form, of tradition

conjure gardens
            of stillness, perfectly raked
                                    a fragrance of tea
                                                soul’s stillness rite
Before us a meal
            bridges paths, cultures
                        taken separately
                                    this company of women
partakes of lives
            we carry inside us, lives
                        known, yet to come
Kuromame’s
            hidden meaning, a game starts
                        mame – good health or diligence
                                    masquerades as bean, mame’s soft center
                                                                        holds sustenance take heart
                                                                                                    be persistent, seek hardiness
Next Kobumake
            seaweed bound in gourd string
                        swell of great water caught in earth’s ban
                                   swallow auspiciousness, elation, joy

Yorokobu 
    verb citing happiness 
                        rides sea’s metal taste, mixed tides and rock
                                                                                    into soul harbors

Finally, small fish, Tazukuri
           loose under rice
                        churn soil unseen, fertilize a field
                                    their name holds good fortune
                                                                                    disguised as work

We take them in
            trust to find our fish of favor
                                                under dream lilies
                                                                                    on each soul’s dark floor

 Pandoras
            at feast— East’s wisdom 
                                                friend’s blessing, acceptance
                                                                                    accruing abundance, 
                                                                                                            we carry away

Mid-flight, birds playing
on my mind, you say I’m magnetic
but really rather frenetic, and above all
wind-oriented. We’re in luck.
Love is an open cage: I don’t have wings
but I could leave, no beak but I sing.
You’re no tree but your arms could be
a place to rest.

Your friends with tears in their eyes 
when they describe you,
say your biggest blows
are reserved for others,
in advertisements not for yourself.

I’ll vouch it was a gallant
gesture you made in
stepping aside when the rains came
and the ice came off the pond,
and the brook was bounding

When you let the brook ring out
solo over the mossy banks
you could have made it your show.
But you let it resound for miles,
let it press up the bridge.

Right under the runner’s feet
it sported through the early summer
and you remained quiet,
let the waters hear their
echoing through the hemlock.

And when human mischief
came later down the trail 
with no mind for
the dam builder’s care,
you didn’t do the obvious.

You didn’t exploit the mesh of 
of dark logs overturned.
You didn’t add to the misery
as the water ebbed and ebbed 
and ran no more over – or under.

Instead, you whispered soft assurances
to the poor trickle below,
of rains to come,
bridges to crest,
foamy fringes to conjure at the edges

Friends say you’re the least wind-like wind,
that your true love lies
not in blowdown 
and pick-up-sticks
but in fellowship, in others’ art.

Still, in your mid-career, 
you found time to experiment,
try higher places, to dabble in pointilism
with your yolky and scarlet smudges
confounding the traveler’s footing.

For your mature work,
in the deepest of hollows, 
you knifed fine white lines
into a brown background
the color of deerhide.

When for a moment, 
the gallery soundtrack is paused
and someone tinkles a glass,
the visitor understand that this 
is the moment to collaborate

Find yourself then an emerald brush, 
rough in lobes of wintergreen
at the brown margin of the trail’s edge,
and with the brightest of yellows, 
make splashes of swamp maple.

Consider scoring it simply,
with the sounds of your own footfall –
or let the wind score it for you. 
but you’ll have to ask him directly,
or he’d think he was imposing.

In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved,
there was a Whale, and he ate fishes.         
—Rudyard Kipling

A whale’s spout
shimmying spray high
above the sea falling
soft into quiet, her voice
full of water-music.
Stories like black-
berries, sweet and red
and good and purple
never not once black.
She can read better
than my third grade teacher
Mrs. Fardham, better
than the school librarian.

Clank, clank complains the
radiator to the sticky
trailer floor. Orange
juice grows tufts of dust,
three mini-marshmallows
of Lucky Charms.
Mother’s brown sweater
has a hole. My one sock,
white. What used to
be white was the other
sock, pink. Red plastic cup
NuMaid came in,
tips over, bottom-circled
with Nestle’s Quik.
Burnt split peas taunt
the air. Mother boiled
up soup—nothing soup
about it, just black crust.

I am on the sea.

You must particularly
remember the suspe
ders.
Nextdoor to this voice
is a laugh. Knock, knock.
Come in.
A fresh cup Nestle’s Quik
laughs out my nose.
Mother pats my hair.
Clank, clank.
Mother looks at radiator,
plastic cup, me, book.
A page tickles my leg. Her one
arm round me, fat and white,
jumpy and soft. What her other
arm does is read.
A sailor sits inside the whale’s mouth
where secrets jiggle and foam.
You can catch them if you are
boneless and thin like a minnow,
if you move without attracting attention,
if you stay close to the current
about to rip out of there fun-
neling down to the bottom
of the sea where lost sailors
go without a whale, without
suspenders, without a mother.

Day 7 /  Poem 7

come like waves
monotonous, a chorus
endlessly rehearsing
on a ridge above Atlantic
motion

Pemaquid, a wreck collecting
slash point, lighthouse
brick-red rescue station
bell and life rings
Long lost Maine men
no doubt women
children, families foundered
scores important, dear
or necessary
drowned in sight of help

A park now…..museum
full of ship’s logs
past storm sagas
construction
life before electric current
radios helped keepers
man this post against
surf, storm surge
raging destruction,
up the coast
whole days and nights

Strangers from away
loiter, laugh nearby
grief’s reliquaries
sun mocks disaster

Anywhere you look 
The world cracks open
The bear eats Orion
Cygnus too
Canis Minor takes Vega 
Because two stars is just a line
Cassiopeia busts out the chains
And Centaurus
He runs and runs and runs 

 

For a convenient time
with no small smuggery,
I assumed more than modest credit 
for uniformly warm receptions 
in Cairo and Bahrain,
on Rue St. Denis and the Heights of Brooklyn.

While it was true that a perfectly-accented Salaam
Was an opener of ways, 
It was ever the case that 
I was among honorable people,
with spectacular hospitality for the stranger,
with level ground stretching for days.

To arrive in Aqaba, then, on a repurposed tanker,
with a cargo of hard red winter wheat 
from the Galveston silos
meant being invited home for a feast,
meant being feted by Palestinian longshoremen 
with more honor in their sandals than…Well, let’s just say, than most.

We were there for two weeks
and in truth, every day of gangway watch
was a feast of  Salaamu alaikum and 
Keif al hal, ya habibi? 
Of shukran, afwan, and morning of goodness to you!
Must I tell you I loved these men immediately?

One careless day of chipping rust
caused temporary blindness in one eye.
And for this reason, with sunglasses in perpetual use,
Ahmed’s father was rightly cautious –
What was the aim of this American friend, after all,
with his agreeable ways and good accent? –
but without ado they piled my plate high with lamb and pilaf,
delivered by silent and scarcely visible female hands
from the adjoining room.

In leaving, Ahmed put in my hand
a tasseled plant hanger, fashioned
from the strands of a mooring line,
embellished with miniature Coke bottles,
An artist friend tied on my wrist 
an embroidered bracelet with my name.

Purple was his favorite color
And he wanted more than anything to tattoo,
but without equipment, he was wasting his talent
on a sand-in-a-bottle for my girlfriend,
with a picture of us smiling out of it,
fresh off the motorcycle.

At every turn a hadeeya and
what was I to leave them with?
Give-away wheat for the Jordanians?
More extravagant American largesse
for the neighbor to the west
had put all of them in permanent exile.

I made a long list of things they needed,
fully expecting to return.
Do I have to tell you I never did?

—erasure from “The Girl Scout Promise and Laws,” The Girl Scout Handbook, 1960

   SCOUTING
               you think                    Help prepare and serve

                                                hostesses

       affair

                                                                 darn,

        triangular                     patch turn

         buttons
stitch

                                                                        find

                        skills

     code

                                                anyone
                                                            Promise
                                                                           troop                       

                                                                                                            RANK

                                                                        gain
                                                            Laws

                                                            plays

confidences

                                                                                    religion

                                                            useful

  

prepares
                                                                       sister 

            feeling         

creed

                                    “Thank you”

Day 6 /  Poem 6

four planets
sometimes five
line up and
with the moon
make pattern in the sky

Announced, I fell
under the spell
of such arrangement
determined to see
degrees of brilliance
and a faintly pink
Mars orb often

But cloudless days
bred cirrus clouds
thinned over evening
or cumulus inland
from shore sluiced
rain made for
muggy fog at dark 

The only night
clear and sharp to see
my daughter called
to say their line
laid clear but cold 
as deep as ice floes
kept me in

Three rimes now
a moon starched
white ablaze with 
Jupiter no farther
than a cosmic beath
away hung vivid 
not far off Mars
then Venus 

Night then fed
me satisfaction
a view of order
orbits, motion set
discoverable
far beyond Earth’s
vagrant wind

Late, hard charging 
down Avenue A, 
I’m opening and 
closing my mouth 
as instructed. 
Bite. All good, 
I’m pulling it together, 
enough of that 
metaphor bull, 
I am a woman 
not an opening book. 
I think I’ve got it, 
then: Wide now.
Funny of me to be upset 
over what was there 
all along, 
blood on the bib, 
my white shirt, 
the cracked leather chair.

I’m a conscript for the annual leaf count
and perched on my fine, unfinished porch,
to the strains of Appalachian Spring,
I count six of maple, three of oak 
a flutter of yellow wildly off axes,
due for an alignment.
On the ground, there’s an immediate sameness,
an equaling of the playing field,
an evening of color,
a Lois Lenski landscape
in the making.
From this fine perch,
highly visible also is a man-made 
whorl of material goods which
eddy continuously against the domed shed,
a dangerous semicircle of stuff.
I count one roll of wire fencing,
five discontinued signs,
two teak chairs in need of tlc,
a blur of landscape lights
three bags of potting soil.
Cluttering may be accomplished with anything.
The leafy descent begins again
with no ceremony.
There’s no talking
off of any ledge.
When a breeze comes,
light-hearted summer is gone.
But wait! Some reverse migration
is taking place in the forest.
A flutter of wings,
a flurry upward into the lower branches.
Sparrows protest in chorus,
Focus focus focus on the living.
You should count count count us instead.
And now I’ve lost count.

White majesty
below snow oh
laden boughs whoa
slow, sloe-slides,
derring-do, glow, gild,
glide, swoop, bound,
bend at the knees
the once-home-
body, the girl bred
indoors, the packed
snowball melting
in the stuffy air
of a library;
the doorstopper
of an old church
after hours
waiting to get
somehow home,
never knowing this side
of out, hurtling now with
winter wind, flaked
by drifts from grey
cloud melting as
they land on the brim
of fleece hat. For-
ever changing, magicked
by mountains, rolling
over dipsy doodles
and scoring deeper
the clean white track.
A young witch foresees
the future, keeps
potions to herself.
Her cauldron a three-
ounce weight in the
center of her chest,
a heat of hopes,
a fire no one knew.

Day 5 /  Poem 5

                        Murakami After Dark

Like its country of minimalist perspectives:
                        a café afloat in time
                                   nearly subterranean, windowless
like my dream where I travel with one other adult,
                        an unidentified movie star, a group of teens.
Our trip veers to Texas, featured in yesterday’s news
                                               where a hail storm of golf balls,
                                                                       unthinkably injured 90.

Our conversation mentions time and space,“
                     In Texas we don’t worry about distance, 
                                    drive to get anywhere.” Dream ignoring boundaries
                                               steals a memory from my Midwestern childhood.                                                                        

The teens worry us, not clear in focus or intent, we watch them
                        and the movie star has a premonition about her own journey.
                                    After leaving us she sees herself make a choice
                                                on a highway, a mistake;
                                                            her car jumps the pavement….righting it
                                                                                    a catastrophic accident occurs.

                                                                        II

The novel….rearranges me in sleep….cafe patrons enter, sit in one chair
            to travel time, back or forward….knowing the present won’t change
                    the way I know my dream dances between
                                          teenage grandchildren:
                        lost, forging forward, dreaming of wild freedom;
                                                                       and
                        echoes of my choices,
                      wondering or remorse
                             that can’t change the present.

Storms and accidents, a movie star and teens carom; sleep’s fog holds me,
                        “price of motherhood” occurs….a statement? theme?
                                                            conundrum?
                        friends’ stories…..mix….walking out of Communist Hungary
                                    a child left some years and then a continent,
                        journeys to rehabilitation, divorces, migration over oceans
                                                                 education
                                                      choces, destinations
                                                                  to live.

                                                                        III

Our noisy teens are out at night, running amok

                      on Emerald Avenue, Harvey Illinois, 
                                    hooting in my post-war childhood, Texas past and gone.
The only task is capture; we call them, watch them scatter,
                        want them caught before they wake the neighbors.
5:30 am restless, I bunch covers at my neck, search sleep, flee waking;
                        dream clamor carries on, we chase them across lawns
                                                            off porches, streetlights lend low light.

Stymied I leave bed, laptop and phone in hand
                        dusky, morning bedroom left, mysterious Japanese café ––
                                   odd companions –– abandoned for cooler windowed rooms.
                                                Night’s busy shadows backlight 
                                                               yawns and morning coffee. 

Nothing funny ever happens
to me. Yesterday it iced.
Everyone slipped
and fell on their asses,
even the dogs. Uptown
the museum didn’t let us in.
So the search for warmth
continued. On 42nd
I watched my friends fall in love.
At home I washed three
blue bowls, noticed how perfectly
they held each other
in the sink. The doctors pulled
something out of me today.
I can’t stop thinking about it
and I won’t tell you what
it was. I didn’t even feel it.
I was home within the hour.
Funny, the things we carry.

If you stick your head out into the February cold,
at six on a Saturday morning,
you’ll hear the sounds of industry
the distant clang of dumptruck tailgate,
the rumble of others speeding down
Highway One with work to be done.

My work is to finish the end of a cigar
and think of my mother 
in the bowels of another February
in the brutal winters of the 70s,
puffing away on her Menthols –
there in the attached woodshed,
neither in nor out,
paper-correcting, verse making,
with only an ermine for company.

My work is to remember
an evening in the blizzard,
an aborted return from the gym
a hill the Dodge Dart could not crest,
a trip to the next town, 
where the way was mostly downhill,
an evening in strange beds.

My work is also to recall
the impromptu sledding parties,
a neighborhood crawling with kids
with two hills to choose from –
both exhilarating but even more
so, the conversations enjoyed 
while clawing our way back to the summit.
What I wouldn’t give now for an ermine-
and a hill we couldn’t crest.

“Where the dogs of society howl”
                                                —Elton John

Dogs wearing strings of pearls,
turning around in the spotlight,
puddles of poodles on
pedestals. A ten-year-old’s vision
in the lodge by the fire,
at the old wooden table
stacked with Chinese checkers
and Sorry. A boy has opened a songbook,
spiral bound, the words cinched in
notes, unspooling like ribbons, stretchy
and colorfast. Who is it she’ll call
Mom and Dad, now that she’s an orphan
of the mind? Wonderingly she sings.
Gold brick or linoleum, sterling
or gingham. When is she going to land?
She was never a farmer. Her foster sister
will call her city slicker, next year as
they ride in the carpeted pen of the
station wagon, beltless, making
faces at drivers. Passing fence-stitched
fields, plaid vests buttoned with cows, the
new sibling will catch her gawking. Tonight
by the yellow fire, with the sweet-voiced boy
with the songbook, the lines spark and
crackle, and she knows the word for the
moment—it’s written if she needs to look.
The hall empties of campers and
the night goes silent at her back
beyond memory, door, and song.

Day 4 /  Poem 4

old white guys,
several acceptable
minorities
of power,
a few women,

                                                                        in a green marble room
                                                                        where,
                                                                        purportedly,

meeting will
deliberate, decide
the course for
Israel and Palestine….

                                                                        currently
                                                                        blowing each other’s
                                                                        buildings and cities
                                                                        to bits.

My thirteen
year old daughter 
proclaimed – often loudly
impatient,
                        “This relates to me how?”

                                                                                                                              I’m asking, amended,
                                                                                                                              her question – now

Gentlemen, ladies,
safe –– a bit old ––
                  free of danger-torn sleep,
                                                       answer please

                                                                                                                              Your confab cites
                                                                                                                              Gaza – Israel — war
                                                                                                                                      Synonyms:

                                           loss
                                                                                                                              bloodshed, terror — but

words never spoken
bluntly in talks:
                  babies, old women                       
                       teen-agers
                young men or women

HOW?

                                                                                                how?

How?

I’m trying,
I want to
believe you, believe                                    

                                    posing –
                                    serious looks –
                                    such public attention

                                                                                          to wholesale dying
                                                                                          can stop lives
                                                                                                            exploding ––

                                                                                                                                                will help,
                                                                                                                                                will repair, 
                                                                                                                                                will somehow halt hate.

Instead,
suffering reigns
continents away:
children die,
sirens cut night,
old people weep,
day follows day
bereft a
fresh start.

You settle for
settling for
no peace – no 
settling to 
grief kept at bay.

You lean
into talking, 
day after day
while
wailing and 
wounding 
engulf
what you say.

Please pick up 
the phone it’s me 
I’m almost ready 
to be myself
you don’t have to 
die to haunt me
I’m only in the next 
room pick up can’t you 
hear me through 
the walls don’t you 
understand the phone 
ringing 
                         and ringing 
is a door. 

It’s been clear this whole time
that you were letting go
by dribs and drabs,
in and out of accordance 
with some plan of action.

Had you not talked
of hemlock and Switzerland,
Had your cool goodbyes 
not been from the couch?
How often had I 
seen myself to the door?
How often had that light
stayed on until morning?

But on that last evening,
heading hugless into the chill,
I knew you were hardly alone
that I myself was downshifting,
declining to throw in more chips.

On that evening and others like it
I had shuffled in and out
blankly, as if clipboarded
to deliver some parcel,
my heart swathed in bubblewrap.

With your signatures in hand,
I have the permit now
for some damage control of my own.
You’ve given me the go-ahead
And commandment to
steel myself also for that day.

So I might as well be straight
with you about my own plan,
to not have loose ends,
to not leave things to chance,
to gird myself wherever possible
for that final storm.

It’s in service of this
that my roads rise ever higher
with bigger culverts, more riprap.
A seawall for the 100 year flood,
built with the ruggedness that
you’re always counseling.

Yet surely as these bulwarks rise
the walling off changes the equation
raises the risk that
we’ll become an inland people.
that, with all our careful distancing, 
we may make of the sea
a thing only of memory.

So tonight I’ll cease such labor, 
I’ll breeze in without the clipboard,
high-five the man on the recliner,
hug the woman on the couch.
I’ll sit through a woodworking how-to
and try not to complain overly
about Gaza, about the next four years. 

For as long as I can stand the wood heat,
I’ll face the coming tide.
Without laying another course of brick
I’ll face the sea. 
Without placing another sand bag
I’ll let go a little less.

“He kisses.”

In reach of the yearning mailbox cubbies, the cavalier rolodex, the snappy red vinyl binder, Sylvia swivels at the laminated wood desk, training her new hire. She expounds on the switchboard, a black plastic two-part telephone with thirty-three lines lettered with white tabs slipped under clear plastic. She details staff roles, company titles, and her pro strategy for when all the lights are flashing: she darts in for a layup, sets up each call, and slam dunks it into the right basket.

“Who kisses?”

“The president.” Nattily dressed in a platinum skirt suit, with a voice soft and sleek as the glug of the water cooler, Sylvia dials a smile disconnected from eyes that can’t put sadness on hold. She runs through break relief, the paging system, the meeting schedule, who can be interrupted by whom, and when. Who can’t be interrupted, ever. 

“On the lips?”

Last year she went south on a Greyhound bus where they lost her suitcase and her shoes, her best shoes, the Famolares, the Evan Picones, the Ann Taylors. It’s going to be hard getting a vacation in her new position for the Vice President of Finance. She turns to the metal morgue-drawer below the IBM Selectric II and riffles through supplies: ribbon, correct-tape, envelopes both letter and legal. She retrieves the pink “While You Were Out” pad, illuminates how you must never skip the date, or time, or your signature. Her close-cropped hair is more silver than black beneath the office lights. “Yes, he’ll come by and kiss. It’s what he does.”

“But I don’t—”

She suggests I study extension numbers, writes them down, from the Vice President of Development, to the Vice President of Operations, to the Maintenance Supervisor. She purses lips of frosted plum. Once she divulged offhandedly this was the coolest tone she could wear or the lipstick would turn her blue.

A worker told me that once you got to know Sylvia, she was warm and chatty, while her bearded, balding, rosy-cheeked preacher husband could turn stone-cold silent at home.

“How do you—?”

“Keep the lips hard,” she says, turning to me, her eyes a midnight bus on a faraway hill. “I  just keep the lips hard. Then it’s over. You have to draw the line somewhere.” 

Day 3 / Poem 3 

                    (be not afraid)

Said on a deathbed 
as she left us all behind 
that never happened.

After days lying mute  
blinks as answers, squeezed hands,
small movements of her head,

we said goodnight –– took grief
away with us, left her still
asleep, no signs of worry or unease.

The call to say she’d gone
beyond our restless longing,
patient melancholy, dread,
came in early hours of dawn.

Be not afraid.
I leave you softly, without
tearful straining –– slip
instead, away, without a gasp

of sorrow –– knowing 
love will hold you
as I always have

show you we can fly   
rise into morning
unattended

on my way / late / I step over a waterlogged mouse / a tiny thing bloated /  with all he didn’t know / he could hold / for a moment he was his mouth / I consider the want / how it goes on and on / like that / you wished and there I was / many years in the pain house / taught you failure / is the shortest longing / so you fell / until wings arrived / so yeah we pass a cemetery / on the way to the hospital / damn right I’m a lucky dog / to guide you / when you die / they’ll come for me too / I’ll take it lying down / in the dirt / close to you / I will dig myself a hole / no / a tunnel

“Ty Jean” was texting with a job to be done
said I’d be through in two days, maybe three
I’d a bit of trim work, a door to make plumb
and then I’d stop in, then I would see.

Now Ti Jean was a name I knew from somewhere
so I let it rumble around for a bit.
It meant Little John, but I couldn’t swear.
Unsure, I thought, French Canadian, wasn’t it?

And then it came to me all of a sudden
Jack Kerouac was texting from deep in his cups
to speak of some sheetrock in dire need of mudding,
a kitchen to demo, new cabinets to put up.

Was Ti Jean drinking, was his liquor in play
I really couldn’t make sense of it all
but the writer from Lowell was one town away
needing some work and soon I would call.

Imagine then the degree of surprise
as my clumsy brain got wind and came to,
when it was not at all as I surmised
not at all the intemperate writer I knew

But a tall woman who answered the door.
at which I laughed through and through.
Her name was Jean and what’s more
She’d been thanking me all this time: ty…thank you.

 

after Raymond Carver

 South on Oregon Coast
Highway hang a right on thirty-
fifth: For Lease, used to be Rite Aid.
Folks speculate what will
fill the locked warehouse, stock
the bracketed metal troughs.
We hoped, an organic market.
Corporations said, nope, sorry,
not enough people.

Turn right at the stop,
quiet after crews in sunny orange
reflective vests flagged us
along for months. “New
traffic pattern,” we’re warned.
It’s been signless
long as anyone remembers,
and change is hard.

Hear the carefree whoosh
of cars with no reason
not to go fifty in this
forty-zone. When you see
the brown county sign,
look west for a swoop of hill.
Imagine pert playground, swings,
stairs down to the river
flanked by logs and pretzeled
with bent, broken, tumbled
shore pines.

Imagine sparkling river,
sand mush, the shining heads of seals
with conical noses sipping air
above the Siuslaw on a cold and
brilliant day. A blue-silver
ocean will glimmer, held
at arm’s length by the jetty.
You won’t be going that way.

Take the winding next left,
slow your wheels to the barking
of dogs, the buzzing of yard equipment,
the swirling chimney smoke.
Samsung tractor has been
removed from the neighbor’s yard.
Step over the tidy planks of the
graying cedar porch and open
the door to Bob Dylan’s
Memphis Blues. A man is
working with his hands with wood
and clay, at what you used
to call a kitchen table. Now you
both call it whatever you need,
whenever you like. Stand at
the window to watch sunshine
limn grey-middled clouds which
break apart over the ocean.
Everything has conspired to
bring you home. 

Day 2 /  Poem 2

          They crossed uncrossable seas/Morning wraps the stars and the dark
                                       What overtakes us before departure?

2001:  Gary and I cast off….heading toward the Platte River Road, named after pioneer wagon trains moving west.  I am packing Kirsten, my Swedish character arriving mid-1880s; memories of Swedish grandparents, Sweden and long-lost family found and met on my 1988 research trip then visited and known; a Wyoming grandpa exiled to Indiana forty years or more  not forgetting his early outdoors; my restlessness to braid a story/poem…..America on levels: geographic, heartbeat real, flying toward freedom……quests confused, passed on, mine to reckon…confront, send on…..Kirsten’s voice accompanies us.  2021: Just what it cost people moving so completely away, that tearing looms large….precedes arrival…..so many facets: politics, the yearning, singular pain and separation…..waves of history….loss enshrouding all.  2025;   Newscasts spew the aftermath                                       challenge of uprooting left unsung.

I sit here
shining like the ghost of myself
blue night cold on my skin
moon out

Through these windows
I have watched every day of my life
hands busy over bread or potatoes
hair braided, lying down my back
My mind wanders

Up alone
I see Marten
back to me, hand flung up –
sleeping
reaching                                                                      

I sit
memorizing the curve of table,
painted cabinet doors
iron locks and handles
Legs drawn under my night shirt
create the only heat
first sun warmth rising
from new-washed cloth

I have no reason to be wakeful–
except cherishing
sharp wooden bowl
rims, edges of boards
no reason except
watching this night pass by
no reason except
loving the moon – 
needing to soak my skin
in her winter white
cold clear shock of spring                               

Who am I
Who will I be
for the America journey
Will I pack
blue and white dishes
on shelves at the end of the sink
What will I abandon
I glance at Marten’s back
the chairs
our coats on hooks
paired clogs facing the wall

We have talked of going
when days turn warmer
I am making my mind ready
but turning the heart takes time
I am ready
but windows and floors hold me
I sit here
fingering my hand-woven table mat
trying to make the new place
in my mind                                                                              
but I cannot get past 
pines and birches in light
I sit in the night
cold and white and waiting

2021:  Absolute separation…..doubts and surrender 

When I am the hole
I imagine the promise

The ground keeps to the seed
And when I don’t fit in my body

I imagine myself a flower
That lives free and dies anyway

God is merciful
But man condemns her forever

If I’m the fallen woman
I’ll kneel to the end

It’s the barred owl today
which rules the sky, arrests the eye,
halts my passage to the henhouse.
The bulk of him, stark against
tracery of oak, counsels caution
before any setting out of grain

Some pause would seem in order
for might he not be the one
who sized up the hens
some several seasons ago
before dutifully taking his place beside them 
on dung-spattered roost?

Imagine my amusement when
there at a slight remove from the others,
a somewhat plumper, slightly grayer
Leghorn appeared off to one side
of the roost-cum-abacus –
while the others swallowed mightily.

You shouldn’t judge me harshly
for shooing him forthwith
from the coop, as it was too much
to bear, the thought of him nibbling
into the night, on my layers.

This time around, I haven’t 
the heart to disturb him.
For if it’s a Leghorn he wants to be
I won’t stand in his way.
I know what it is to want to be another.

After all, I’ve been an understudy
t the neighbor’s goatshed for years.
I’ve played the goatherder
and feeder of hay,
I’ve been filler of tubs
and watcher of scrums.

I’m sure the neighbor won’t mind,
If one day I take the stage,
upset both the grain
and the water,
chew everything in sight. 

God knows I’ve been acting 
the goat for years.

“I feel above me the day-blind stars”
                                                —Wendell Berry

Blindly spinning, searing, and sparking, these far planets and suns turn their faces from us in the day.

Beneath them children are reaching for their mothers, children taken from homes and flung into atmosphere, chunks broken from orbit.

In another time, fear blinded the eyes of my mother who, surviving rape and shock treatments, was locked in white rooms behind steel doors.

I want a new darkness: a supernova or a comet launch, or to become God’s eye. I stumble, jouncing a hoe-down as I square up to the light, a square dance to the zenith, my heart playing fast on the fiddle.

Stars are smiling at me. “See? We told you, you couldn’t save the world.” Darkness or day, seeing is not necessary, but I must keep looking.

Day 1 /  Poem 1

captures birds in habitats
so clearly rendered
splashes under a Hooded Merganser
look opaque
as murky streamside water spurts

His birds terrify
Sharp cut beaks, eyes intense
feathers extended or at rest
with surgical precision
legs poised for balance 
or a run for cover to throw
themselves into a marsh

I recoil – me, lover of birds
alert for hawks hunting roadside 
when falling leaves bare trees
preening near the screened in porch
alight on highway signs

Audubons, accurate to a fault
aim no quickened glance
as predators or prey
fixed eyes wrong
create no sound
of rootedness or flight 

Will children read
themselves so later
random birthdays 
vacation shots 
Christmas groups

until she threw that stick I 
                                            didn’t know how to run 

she was soft and desperate 
                                            for breath she took the fastest

way to me they call desire 
                                            a path for a reason she’d come in 

panting and stinking of 
                                             coffee and sweat

had me thinking I love dirt

I’m here to say that
before any dying or funeral commenced,
before the accident and the early morning call
before any of this happened,
there was a white birch tree,
middle-aged like me.

I’m here to say, that before 
the amputation – that is,  
before I knew the cause and the effect
of early morning strike in the dungeon-thick fog –
I saw the wound when it was fresh.

Before the amputation
I saw the wound high up,
about the height of a side-by-side.
I saw the peel of periderm and phloem,
and the blaze of bared cambium.

I’m here today, before all that happened,
before the vengeful sawyer
arrived with Stihl in hand
to efface his loss,
to say, there was a tree.

As for what became of
that tree after it was felled
so cleanly and so evenly –
bucked up into four foot sections,
like some articulated parsnip –
that I cannot say.

But before the road is any further widened,
before dirt yields finally to asphalt,
before more friendly folk from Florida
arrive to blast their country from the hill,
I’ll offer again that I knew this tree.

What I can say, is that this 
middle-aged white birch tree
crowded like a matador, this sinuous road,
flirted with the snow plow’s blade,
grew in concert with the others.

I’m here to say
I knew that tree,
though not well.

Like an errant weather
pattern, I was out of season,
and my menu was changing.
I met Abby, who boasted
an array of greens—
beet, endive, chicory, frisee. She
shelved crocks of teas, delved into
pecans and chick peas, seasoned 
her plates with saffron and turmeric.
She served on swirl-glazed
pottery, her table swathed in batiks,
the air bright with ashram|
Indian spice, her kitchen
pulsing exotic heat.

I wanted that in my celery-salt life.

At the organic market I
bought night-sky-green glossy
leaves, clumped long and thick,
shaped like a dust broom.
My attempt came out gnarled
and harsh on the tongue—all scratch
and stalk, no taste. Abby said
you have to massage the kale.

It seemed an oddly intimate
vegetable interaction. Her
advice could be biased! (After all,
she was a massage therapist.)

Despite my doubts, I kneaded,
crimped, rolled and rumpled—
anathema to a head of iceberg.
Between my palms, I rubbed and twirled
with a force to wilt romaine.
The kale bled green blood into
the sink, shedding what it didn’t
need, preparing to feed us all.

Within a year, Abby would be
elsewhere, with her salads and
spices and knowing hands. I could make
my own kale dishes by then,
deeply nourishing delicious fare
that required all my tenderness
and strength.