STAR OF WONDER, STAR OF LIGHT

It's Christmas, the year before the accident, when the earth

still seemed fixed.  My husband and children are hanging

lights on the big pine tree, the one that Becky

brought home as a seedling in first grade wrapped in a damp

paper towel.  I am cooking dinner while they struggle

with the wires that somehow knot themselves up in the box.

Shadows gather behind the hills.  The tree turns dark green,

then black.  The tangled string unravels, and they pass it

around, loop over loop, while I watch from the steamy window:

husband, son, and daughter in a circle around the tree,

their arms full of stars.

                        Radiance (Word Press)

 

NATIVITY

In the dark divide of mid-December

when the skies are heavy, when the wind comes down

from the north, feathers of snow on its white breath,

when the days are short and the nights are cold,

we reach the solstice, nothing outside moving.

It’s hard to believe in the resurrection

of the sun, its lemony light, hard to remember

humidity, wet armpits, frizzy hair.

Though the wick burns black and the candle flickers,

love is born in the world again, in the damp

straw, in some old barn.

                                    Windhover

                       

 

THE METEOROLOGY OF LOSS

Every Christmas,

as my mailbox

is snowed in

with cards,

I shovel aside

the expected,

keep looking

for the friends

who don't write;

who've moved, don't

forward their mail,

or stop

sending cards;

somehow become lost.

 

My husband says

to think of the cards

I do receive:

kodaks of plum-

cheeked babies,

long, long letters;

to think of the friendships

that last, skein back

through years, fit

like old sweaters.

 

But I still think

of the friends

that drift away

like snowflakes,

their loss

a wind-

chill factor:

the cast off stitches,

the unwound yarn . . . .

            Starting from Zero (Foothills Press)

                                               

 

SMALL POEM FOR THE NEW YEAR: 

EVERYTHING THAT ISN'T GREY IS BROWN,

the roadside flowers, sky-blue chicory, goldenrod,

Queen Anne's Lace now turned to beige, khaki, fawn;

lawns that stretched like velvet carpets

are faded quilts of dun and bone.

Grey bark of poplars, paler birches, a quick-

silver brook still running, the thin cusp

of a new moon, everything

without color.  And I'm out on the back road,

the stony wayside, walking on the sleeping earth

in this thin new year, wanting to walk right into the sky,

an oyster shell of taupe and pearl

that dapples everything beneath it.

                        The Santa Fe Sun

 

LES EFFETS DE NEIGE:  IMPRESSIONISTS IN WINTER

Exhibit at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

When they tired of painting sun and wind, they turned to fog,

ice, and snow, tried to find some other way to catch the light,

to pin it down, a brooch on a dress or a nail in a barn.

How many different tubes of paint are there for white?

 

Camille Monet glances at us over her shoulder,

framed by the gauzy curtains, shrouded in snow.

Caillebotte’s chimneys exhale, like glamorous women in a café. 

Pisarro piled snow on his rooftops,  slabs of cake thick with fondant.

Sisley fell in love with shadows, all those cool blue notes,

while Gauguin forsook the hot light of Tahiti for thatched huts

in Brittany, snow slipping from the eaves.

 

Soon, another cold front will move in from the west,

turning the air crystalline, and they will go at it again:

a flurry of brushstrokes, a snow squall

of new paintings shivering on their easels.

                        Line Dance (Word Press)

 

THE SLATE GREY JUNCO

with his immaculate bib, sooty jacket,

bobs in the snow for sunflower seeds.

Caught between two needs, hunger and shelter,

he keeps coming back, even as the arctic wind

shuttles him like the cock in a badminton game,

wind that rattles the windows, shakes the house,

and blows the snow in great sheets across the yard.

But here he is again, charcoal wings beating hard,

as he skids off the barbecue lid, comes in for another

landing.  What comes back? Memory and desire,

my grandmother, long gone, the empty rooms

in my parents’ house, voices of friends

beyond the reach of wires, white thread in a bobbin,

a chain of stitching, the line of waves along the shore. 

Fugue and variations, the wind’s refrain.

Snow, folding back on itself, warping

and woofing the scarf of the storm.

                        Line Dance (Word Press)

 

ZERO AT THE BONE

The scouring light of winter

scrubs whatever it falls on,

the bright whiteness revealing

all the small incursions,

marks and stains of another year.

In the bare bones of trees, we see

old nests, broken branches, bagworm, gall,

all that was hidden by summer’s green scrim.

Now we are at the heart

of things, the bone chill

of zero, the closed eye

of the pond.  No secrets.

Only stories the wind brings

as it howls down chimneys,

whistles through eaves.

This is the blank text of the snow,

these are the unwritten lines.

The journey without a ticket,

the century running out of time,

the heart’s arithmetic:  nada nada nada.

                        Line Dance (Word Press)

 

VALENTINE

                                                “The heart is devious above all else;

                                                it is perverse—who can understand it?” 

Jeremiah 17:9

It’s the beginning of February, winter’s ash end.

No flowers blooming.  I’ve hung hearts in all the windows:

red glass, stamped clay, beveled prism, woven willow strips.

Thirty years ago, my first-born came and went

in one brief day.  Now, the snow is busy, composing its small

white music, the little notes tumbling off the staff.

The heart wants and wants and wants some more.

Spring so far in the distance, it will never arrive.

Those babies in the nursery, pink and blue blossoms.

Grief and heart could be the same word; both have five letters,

both rhyme with blood.  Snow is the mute language of loss.      

                  Line Dance (Word Press)

 

SKATING AFTER SCHOOL

In the space between school and supper,

light flat as a china plate,

sky and ice a single seam

stitched by black trees,

we raced over the railroad tracks

down an embankment to the frozen pond,

snow embroidering our flannel jeans.

Then out, onto the ice, blades dividing

the surface into geometry,

ice writing from an old language,

until it's a blackboard in need of erasing.

And, as the baggage of school disappeared,

ephemeral as smoke from the bonfire

where we charred hot dogs, made dark cocoa

that burned our tongues,

we went back out onto the ice again,

feeling the slap and chock of the hockey puck,

the ache of air inside our lungs . . . .

And as the dark came down like a coffee cup,

we saw the lights come on up over the tracks.

But we kept playing, icing the puck,

shooting straight for the goal,

legs aching beyond endurance . . . .

Home, where the yellow lights are growing,

fills with the smell of macaroni & cheese

and muffins, but we stay out, still checking and hitting

wood against wood, our steel blades marking the ice.

And, when we knew we could not stand it

any longer out in the cold,

we clambered up the banks,

falling on the cinders,

woodsmoke and winter clinging to our clothes,

climbing, climbing, toward the steady yellow lights of home.

                        The Lost Children (The Heyeck Press)

                        Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press)

 

ORDINARY LIFE

This was a day when nothing happened,

the children went off to school

remembering their books, lunches, gloves.

All morning, the baby and I built block stacks

in the squares of light on the floor.

And lunch blended into naptime,

I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,

one of those jobs that never gets done,

then sat in a circle of sunlight

and drank ginger tea,

watched the birds at the feeder

jostle over lunch's little scraps.

A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,

preened and flashed his jeweled head.

Now a chicken roasts in the pan,

and the children return,

the murmur of their stories dappling the air.

I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.

We listen together for your wheels on the drive.

Grace before bread.

And at the table, actual conversation,

no bickering or pokes.

And then, the drift into homework.

The baby goes to his cars, drives them

along the sofa's ridges and hills.

Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,

tasting of coffee and cream.

The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,

the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,

but this has been a day of grace

in the dead of winter,

the hard cold knuckle of the year,

a day that unwrapped itself

like an unexpected gift,

and the stars turn on,

order themselves

into the winter night.

                        Ordinary Life (ByLine Press)

                        Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications)

 

WORLDS END

Wind-hush through the beeches and hemlocks,

wind-rush down the mountains, through the bare trees.

Water-music of the Loyalsock, green ice shelved

along its edges. We are chinked-up tight in a small log cabin,

roar of wood-breath in the cast-iron stove.  At the pine table,

my husband peels an orange, and sweet citrus enters the room,

the sun coming out to play.  No deer.  No rabbits.

A cold that could nail bones.  We are down

to what really matters, keeping warm, staying alive.

My son saws endless lengths of wood.  We work

to keep the fire going, play Monopoly, Uno,

Chinese Checkers.  Mugs of hot chocolate.

Sausage and cheese, sharp mustard.  Wedges of apple.

Chunks of the forest go up in flame.  Just before

bed, we walk single file down the hill to the washhouse,

our visible breath, scarf-lengths, trails out behind.

This is as dark as it gets on this planet,

as if the book of the night has just been written,

and we’re standing here open-mouthed, reading the white-hot

star-spelled stories as if for the first time.

                        Loyalhanna

 

 

© Barbara Crooker