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Veronica Patterson

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.