Poems
The Bamboo in the Garden
One evening during my mother’s last stay at the hospital, after we told her good night, my aunt and I walked uptown. On our way, we encountered a man standing outside an ethnic deli. He held out a smudged Styrofoam coffee cup. And I reached in my purse for money. Don’t do that, my aunt whispered. Read more
Email this pageThe validity of winter
April opens my tight-fisted heart
and rattles away all bias
and judgment
against the winter I fought
yet needed so perfectly.
Today the heavy blanket
I stitched feverishly
with chaotic weave
in fierce, breathless resistance
to early darkness,
death, cold, solitude
and change,
I will cast into the rising Delaware
as my wrong accounting…
seeing finally,
in this blessed armistice
conveyed by troupes of daffodils
and robins,
that not one thing can hold firm,
and no one season
holds more wonder
or validity
than another.
Why I Live Where I Live
Meet me on Old Mine Road
near Bevans Church and
I will tell you about
that snowy February day
on the gravel trail
near Van Campen’s Inn,
air, ice fresh,
rock-strewn fields
like whipped cream swirls,
the sounds of foraging
mice, snow crystals
shifting in afternoon sun,
the click of a Nikon
as we pushed knee-deep
through drifts
shooting crumbling
barns and shadows
cast by barren limbs
in late day light.
I will tell you about
the lone house near
the river’s edge
warm with yellow light,
how wisps of smoke
like wind-blown kite tails Read more
