For My Mother
We take the path of scattered stones,
three generations, balancing ourselves
across the shallow, brisk current.
Our reflections in silt and an earthen sky.
We know that the children
will get their feet wet, eventually,
turning stones ankle deep
and hoping to unsettle a nest
of something squirmy into the cold universe
of twinkling minnows.
Their grandmother shows them blackberries
still red with June, and mossy inclines
where floodwaters have striated topsoil
and trees have pitched over painted rocks.
I try to capture their subtle colors
in a photograph, as if to articulate
the pale shading of one to another,
but I can only see my mother's hat,
its sunlit brim spreading like a ripple
through the whitened logs, the wildflowers.
Don't be afraid to fall, she whispers,
in a voice like the red turn of a summer leaf
as we each find our footing,
wobble a little, and then let go.
Hunger is an Ocean
She came out with the afternoon sun.
The tide, a heavy garment
hanging from her frail, bent frame.
She tossed her baited hook
over waves that stung
at her stomach and waited.
Nothing happened.
How'd you catch so many?
she had asked him.
Fish scales glittering
like flint through pale sand
as he worked his way
through shallow stacks of pink fillets –
whiting, mackerel, pompano.
He knew the fish had scattered now –
a stilled flight into cool branches of deep water,
his shoulders dark with wading
through too many windy dawns to consider.
You want these? he asked
pointing to the stack of fillets
and drawing the blade of his knife
down the beads of spine
that fell whole like a divining line
into the sand between them.
You know, I really do, she said.
The Robins Have Come Back
It is winter here.
Not like the season
of snow packed culverts or icy glazes.
White is too colorless for reckonings.
Sterile as hospital linens on a bed
where a friend with one breast
waits for another prognosis.
The robins are everywhere.
They have charted topography again,
tapped an ancient compass –
its arrow hardly quivering beneath feathers
bright as blood oranges. Orchards,
palm trees, lakes like sea glass, strawberries
ripening in rows sound as stitched incisions.
These are familiar landmarks now.
The ocean, a bearing east of a migration
scented with smoke and evergreen.
Why this returning? Why this returning
now before nests have twined back
around eggshells the fragile color of sky?
We wait with her for answers,
for the cryptic words of doctors,
while our creek beds, our pastures,
the soft twilight at our windows
teem with melodies sung too soon.
Paper Snowflakes
We used to hang them in January,
winter's white, fat fingerprints
taped across window panes,
jeweled with condensation.
Tonight my son remembers
how to make paper snowflakes,
although it is April
and soon he will be too old
for snippets angled and sliced
into a multifold of edges.
Humid sheets of paper
that open into delicate lace.
I see arrowheads there,
kites in midair, Christmas pines,
a compass of small, awkward hearts.
Patterns exacted by randomness,
mirrored and transposed.
A labyrinth of things I want
to keep folded in my hands –
star and thorn, seed and hill,
and a boy's sky that burns
in every wing-shaped opening.
Paper Snowflakes has been selected for publication in Tar River Poetry
Reflection
Against my window,
a moth presses its white wings,
a tiny heart flailed open.
Beneath the cobalt of twilight
the quick breath of flight,
a small cloud beaded on glass.
And don't I know that feeling –
the inexplicable compulsion
of some path toward
indistinct light,
the full weight of stars
glittering across wings
that shred like paper.
No matter how many times
instinct lifts them up again
and whispers back
into the same pale thundering
of torn edges, fragile fire.
All Poetry © Copyright Laura Sobbott Ross. All rights reserved.
|
|
