HAPPINESS
© Barbara Crooker


"She loves West Tenth Street on an
ordinary summer morning"  
(Michael Cunningham, The Hours) 
 
And I love this ordinary summer afternoon,
sitting under my cherry tree full of overripe fruit,
too much for us to pick, an abbonanza of a tree,
I love this dark grey catbird singing its awkward song,
and the charcoal clouds promising rain they don't deliver.
I love the poem I've been trying to write for months,
but can't; I love the way it's going nowhere at all.
I love the dried grass that crackles when you walk on it,
leached of color, its own kind of fire.
Way off in the hedgerow, the musical olio of dozens of birds,
each singing its own song, each beating its own measure.
This is all there is:  the red cherries, the green leaves,
sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise and fall
of the sweet breeze.  Sometimes, just what you have
manages to be enough. 




THIS TIME OF YEAR, 
when the light leaves early, sun slipping down
behind the beech trees as easily as a spoon
of cherry cough syrup, four deer step delicately
up our path, just at the moment when the colors
shift, to eat fallen apples in the tall grass.
Great grey ghosts.  If we steal outside in the dark,
we can hear them chew.  A sudden movement,
they're gone, the whiteness of their tails
a burning afterimage.  A hollow pumpkin moon rises,
turns the dried corn to chiaroscuro, shape and shadow;
the breath of the wind draws the leaves and stalks
like melancholy cellos.  These days are songs, noon air
that flows like warm honey, the maple trees' glissando
of fat buttery leaves.  The sun goes straight to the gut
like a slug of brandy, an eau-de-vie.  Ochre October:
the sky, a blue dazzle, the grand finale of trees,
this spontaneous applause; when darkness falls
like a curtain, the last act, the passage of time,
that blue current; October, and the light leaves early,
our radiant hungers, all these golden losses. 

© Barbara Crooker



MY MOTHER'S PIE CRUST
© Barbara Crooker

Light as angels' breath, shatters into flakes
with each forkful, never soggy-bottomed
or scorched on top, the lattices evenly woven,
pinched crimps an inch apart.
My ex-husband said he'd eat grasshoppers
if my mother baked them in a pie.
Smooth tart lemon, froth of meringue.
Apples dusted with cinnamon, nutmeg.
Pumpkin that cracks in the middle
of its own weight.  Mine are good,
but not like hers, though I keep trying,
rolling the dough this way and that, dusting
the cloth with flour.  "You have to chill the Crisco,"
she says.  "You need a light touch
to keep it tender; too much handling 
makes a tough crust."  
 
Gather the scraps, make a ball in your hands,
press into a circle.  Spread thickly with butter,
sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, roll up, slice, bake. 
The strange marriage of fat, flour, and salt 
is annealed to ethereal bites. Heaven is attainable, 
and the chimes of the timer bring us to the table.



SORROW PUTS ON HER BLUE DRESS
© Barbara Crooker


"He has set me in dark places."  Lamentations 3:1
 
It's spring again, a sky of forget-me-not blue.
The light itself is a flower, the grass so sharp and new
you might cut yourself if you fell.  And this is hell.
To go on living after the death of a child.
You have to get up each morning,
make coffee, pretend to go about your work.
Try to eat some cereal, get it past the lump,
as if you had swallowed an egg,
whole, like a black snake.
Now the earth reinvents itself, draws up
from the roots.  Even plain brown twigs break
into blossoms of heliotrope and cream.  Flashy tulips
spring from the dirt, yellow and red.
You see only their black hearts.
One day, you may learn how to love
the world again, and all its breakable beauty.
But now, as the sun pours out golden as honey,
your heart constricts to a fist of ice.
And it is always winter.



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF REJECTION SLIPS,
and what does it matter?  How many trees have been pulped
for this constant susurrus:  sending, resending, shuffling, sorting?
Even the name submission suggests a certain deference,
servility, prostration:  lying down in front of the mailbox,
and letting the great steamroller of indifference flatten
me into the ground.  You could read the morning newspaper
through my bones.  Maybe here is the lesson:  Look at the wind,
how it turns the pages of the leaves, riffles through chapter 
after chapter, whispers countless stories that no one bothers
to write down.  Look at the stanzas of light in the locust leaves
as they bob and weave in the hot July wind, their effortless green
repetition and refrain.  Why not give it up now?  The phone isn't going
to ring; the mailbox is full of circulars and bills.  So maybe I'll read
to the cardinals and wrens, sink back in the hammock,
listen to the hot buzz of the cicadas' applause.
Look,  clouds are writing their manuscripts on the big blue book of the sky.
They don't fear the wind's erasure, or night's emphatic black rejection.
Tomorrow, a clean sheet comes up in the roller, and we'll start all over again.

© Barbara Crooker

WARRIOR GIRL
© Sandi Braveheart


Oh, breathing earth -
I am laid in your form. 
I can hear the drums 
of your heart beating 
in the rings of the oak. 

I am naked in the grass 
naked on the land - 

and the sun runs red 
into my body - 
and the moon runs white 
into my flesh. 


Oh, breathing night. 
I see the warrior rising. 

She runs - feet pounding 
the earth drum, 
She runs - 
oak bark in her hands. 

She runs - 
through the mud and stars, 
to the edge of the land - 
she is Eos scattering the birth seed. 
She is the Goddess wrapped around 
all that is night.



PASSAGEWAY OF THE COBBLE ARCH
© Sandi Braveheart



she draws her slender portraits - 

her ladies bowed, her trees bending, her houses tilting

fingers engaged in fastening

mysteries in rose scented handkerchiefs

quite careful the living should weep save

for the whispers - one poised at the mantle perhaps plaiting

plans to sweep the closet or jam the harvest

 

tossing her vivid copper locks 

in a glossy blur, 

feverish to draw out the layers

embodied in her figures

ambiguous forms 




OWL'S NEST
© Sandi Braveheart


 
the box in the path

contains

2 feathers

of twisted silk

I stroke and kiss

the blue bird song

taste the thread salt

smell the swelling fungi

move my hand across

the hedge - squash the red fruit

and wonder at their poison

clean my palms with scented thorns

of pine - 

look at my feet

dragging moss

onto the trail making

this my reliving place.

 

II

mother

a wonder

in the rocking chair

she kisses my eyes

strokes my cropped threads

then sleeps her own dreams

one motion

last clinging

night rain

fields of nimbus

earth pillows

I am different

she is claimed

 

III

she falls into -

forest bath

be a body

below the ribs

she should

feel a trace of life there

 

III

“girls be careful”

mother fills the water jug

splash! 

there are pebbles in my sneakers

I stand very still

skin against the scrapping stone

and watch the lake swell

drinking water from a tin cup

feeling my heavy sodden feet.

 

IV

body blur 

in the late summer sun

beating things in the water shine

mother holds the jewels

she has hazel eyes

 

V

smooth stone - is my

scent of the forest

arranged in turquoise, jade and black

honest gifts to mend

the bent and mottled

layers of slender stems

before the guardians gather -

 

VI

angel’s chamber

always solar

where she sleeps

glean a golden hue

flutter flesh spirit age

white triangles take to the wind

 

VII

the crevice of the evergreen

moat sweet lavender 

now I am a doll -

shapes and shadows do not rouse me

one hand then another

my own or many

make no mends of comfort

for many turns of the seasons

I will wait for memory

to awaken this silent body