MARRIED NAME
So you’re now named after him.
It’s chiselled into your identity.
You’re no different
from every other married woman you know.
Occasionally, you ask each other
“who were you before…?”
but more for conversation,
not in aid of regaining something lost.
Actually, you don’t mind your new name.
It was like a buzzing insect at first,
flying in and out of your attempted grasp.
You finally snared it on your tongue,
repeated it over and over in silence.
Pure nonsense of course.
Hilarious when you thought about it.
But assimilated for all that.
And what of your old name.
It’s still there, in your family home,
your old bedroom,
but like a broken mirror
held up to your parents’ face.
They’ve lost a daughter,
gained a distorted image.
WHEN THE OTHER IS DREAMING
She rolls from the edge of the bed
to my body and back again.
The springs respond with the rough ping
of a rusted stringed instrument.
Not for the first time in our life together,
I am someone who’s in the way of her restlessness,
not a comfort for just being here.
Her dreams have set her off.
So she’s not really in a bed,
on a mattress, under sheets.
She could be tumbling down a waterfall.
Or dodging falling rocks.
Or being attacked by an intruder
and fighting back the only way she can.
If I was in her head with her,
I’d know better how to respond.
But I’m merely in the physical world.
I’m present but not accounted for.
DAN, THE NATURALIST
Dan is that person
I imagine myself to be.
But I stick to trails.
He merely sees those cutout paths
in thick forest
as setting off points.
He can tell cinquefoil from wild strawberry
when they’re both nothing to me
but white flowers with yellow buds.
And the spring beauty’s
pink and white-striped petals
blush his cheeks the same colors.
He can rub his hand up and down
the bark of an oak,
sense how long it’s lived
and how many years are left to it.
He even has a soft spot
for leathery rosettes of dog lichen
and to see him trundling through
a bog of peat moss
is to witness a kind of love affair
between whorled branches
and his probing, knowing fingers.
He bends down in grass
to examine bobcat scat
and flutters through fern fields like wind.
And he does all the bird calls.
Why else would a deep-blue
indigo bunting appear
to fight off this apparent rival.
He can sit and watch, for hours,
turtles sunning on a log in a pond
or pick up a snake by its tail
and seem to elongate in joy
in parallel to the reptile.
Dan doesn’t put anything down on paper.
He’s too busy tracking
frog life cycles
to bother with that.
To way of thinking,
a poem should never
stand in the way of poetry.
THE BEACH IN WINTER
In November
migrant seabirds arrive,
rest on slippery rock ledges
to the sometimes loud,
sometimes wary, disapproval
of grey and white all-year residents.
In a couple of weeks,
they're gone.
Temperature plunges.
Laughing gulls are not laughing.
Docks are covered in snow.
No pelicans, no plovers.
The beach is as lonely
as ten lovers leaving me.
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