Three Poems by Linda H.Y. Hegland

 

Dancing to Connie Francis

 

You taught me to dance;

my feet upon your feet,

shuffling about the kitchen

to Connie Francis and Patsy Cline.

 

One, two, three.

 

One, two, three.

 

You taught me to be wary -

not to trust promises;

promise is a synonym of lie,

expect one to be the other.

 

You taught me not to want

too much; nor need.

To get by on the strength

of my own heart.

 

You taught me that memories hurt;

that the ones you love most

can’t always be trusted,

nor leaned on or even ‘there’.

 

I learned to survive

because parts of me didn’t,

the only truth that of dancing on your feet

to Connie Francis and Patsy Cline.

 

One, two, three.

 

One, two, three.

Old Bar Piano

 

I am tired before my first sip of wine,

so that by the time I finish

a glass or two, I am dreaming awake.

The keys of the piano beneath my fingers

are slow to respond, weary themselves.

This old bar piano, steeped in beer breath

and old sawdust has had an exhausting life -

twangy country tunes and deep, bitter blues.

 

I dream I sing with the piano, my own

scars matching word for word

with the gouges in her wood, the

stains on her boards; the broken

ivory of the B flat note.

The sad sonority of my notes harmonize

with the resonance of her bruised, blues tones.

 

Third glass now, perhaps a fourth;

the keys need me no longer to find their way.

It is always the way that the

blues find themselves in the

wide awake dreams of drunks or the

weary keys of an old bar piano.

Trees

 

I think the trees would

miss me if I left.

I have given them names

as it should be.

 

Old Mab is a crone,

of that I’m sure;

gnarled and bent, and whiskered;

her apples inedible.

 

Helice loves the stream,

her long willowy arms dabbling

with the frog spawn

and the wet, turning stones.

 

Faith, the linden tree,

is as young as a maiden.

No hurry to grow; thousands of years

to know her place in the pasture.

 

I have not named the Black Locusts,

they are too many, huge families

connected by their roots; gregarious -

they include me in their raucous music on windy days.

 

The trees would miss me if I left.

Who would remember their names?

Who would sing their memories,

join in their laughter on a cold winter night?

 

When I am a ghost I will

go to the trees and ask them

to name me, so I won’t be forgotten

so that I will me missed,  now I’m gone.

Linda H.Y. Hegland is an award-winning poetry, lyric essay, and non-fiction writer who lives and writes in Nova Scotia, Canada. She writes the occasional short story. Her writing most often reflects the influence of place, and sense of place, and one’s complex and many-layered relationship with it. She has published in numerous literary and art journals and has had work nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has previously published two books of poetry - ‘Bird Slips, Moon Glows’ and ‘White Horses’, a book of lyric essays - ‘Place of the Heart’, and a book of verses and vignettes - ‘Remember in Pieces’.