Bearings
– for E
I love moments of half-dark before sunrise
as the year turns inward
the house with you asleep
and my hold rippling outward
to daughters in their places, sister,
brothers who began with me
drinking milk and running into the world
until night came with its Milky Way
*
and in the mountains six days ago
with my sister and one brother
I saw the Way again
and the Big Dipper on the horizon ready
to one day scoop us up
and I was—we were—shiny, and earth
turned beneath us, injured but just-then asleep,
dreaming Himalayas
*
and sometimes I know the other dark by
its scald in my throat, as when we just left
the hospital room where your brother lay, gauze
twisted high above his opened head,
a Trojan soldier crumpled after battle,
I murmured, go back in to him,
say good-bye before we leave—
and then you knew too and you did
From the Window at Dusk
I am not this silence
but in it I hear a strange cry
over and over. Below the window
I see a fox keening
I want to say— its cry
that of a child for its
lost mother. Then I see
a coyote pacing up and down
the lake shore at the end of the yard,
their movements parallel.
The fox the coyote might kill
deliberately draws its attention
but why? Is it distracting
the coyote from a den? What
rules that I don’t know apply?
Dusk is so lonely I’m lonely
in my deepest root.
When at last the coyote
disappears down the rip-rap
to the lake, the fox
slips behind a screen
of low spruce branches.
I stand and stand. Waiting
for my emptiness to speak.
Carried Away
Don’t brood.
There is a place
where morning light
knows the throats
of birds
and ten thousand
stirrings in the wood
pause for a bell
ringing in the distance.
Spend an hour gathering
new kindling—
the shadows of branches—
for a different fire.
No one’s counting
years. Or storms.
An empty gourd
floats down a sliver
of stream, a silvery
stream, a shivering
stream, and, at the last
minute, toss regrets
aboard, no—leave them
ashore. You leap!
The sky will come too.
Candelabra with Horses
– remembering Jim Doyle
Wild ducks
fly in every direction
as if a season were lost.
A vacancy
in the cliff dwelling,
an absence in me.
No death requires a coffin
yet ashes confuse the wind,
dry my tongue.
This poem is a postcard
from the dinosaur age
as I remember it.
Tyrannosaurus Rex,
what meteor struck?
I will remember you
each time I see
an orangeade stand
thatched with blackbirds.
Now come horses
shining and deliberate,
carrying candles.
Veronica Patterson’s poetry collections include How to Make a Terrarium (Cleveland State University); Swan, What Shores? (NYU Press Poetry Prize), Thresh & Hold (Gell Poetry Prize), & it had rained (CW Books), Sudden White Fan (Cherry Grove), and two chapbooks. She teaches creative writing and lives in Loveland, Colorado.
