Five Poems by Carolyn Adams

 

Dispatches from the Other Side 

 

I carry ashes from one ocean  

to another, shifting grief’s burden 

between weary shoulders. 

I’m late.  The seasons have  

turned, and it’s time 

to move on, to forget you.   

But I call you still, in silence,  

waiting for your likewise silent reply. 

I look for you in the vagaries 

of internet searches, 

collect strands of history, 

some you never told, 

others I forgot. 

I’m leafing through your diaries, 

your ephemera.  

 

All the fragmented stories 

start to coalesce,  

but there’s no one to tell, 

no one who could make sense 

of any of it.  Only you. 

 

And you’re out of range, away,  

far from here now.

 

Some Are 

 

After a long silence 

of winter and rain, 

spring has come  

charging in.  On the patio 

where the woman sits, 

two crows overhead 

almost collide in the air, 

a near-miss.  A wren 

approaches her, 

and she remembers seeds 

cradled in her lap 

for the birds and squirrels. 

Her lap is empty now. 

 

The small creatures can’t see 

the flipbook of stories 

careening in her head, 

how she barely, sometimes 

never, recognizes them 

as they speed by.  

 

Today, she finds moments  

in her pockets, takes them out 

and looks them over. 

Some are whole, some are 

malformed, some are being made 

even as she watches them. 

 

She’s struggled with 

the threads that mark her path. 

She’s tired.  She has tried today 

to follow and gather, 

but she doesn’t want to anymore. 

 

And some part of her  

understands that  

she doesn’t have  

to know why.

 

 

Formerness 

 

You may love the house you’re in, 

mend its skeleton-frame, 

wash cabinets and mirrors. 

Try to keep it new. 

Scatter your scent 

in every room. 

 

I look for the lost. 

The ones no one tends.  

Walls crumbled,  

windows shattered. 

They’ve gone wild, feral. 

You’d be afraid  

to spend the night. 

 

I seek them out, 

to stand in their ruin, 

their formerness.   

To feel the texture 

of abandonment,  

the pitted rusting 

wonder of faucets,  

the cold spider glass. 

 

Haunted by stains, 

familiar, lingering, 

their old bones tell me 

stories no one 

remembers anymore. 

Stories without 

any particular endings. 

 

It’s like eternity, 

that emptiness.  

Its wild air 

whistling at eaves, 

moving out beyond 

this address, this street, 

this tethered life.

 

 

The Mother’s Door 

(Erasure poem culled from Mary Baker Eddy’s Pulpit and Press) 

 

The Mother’s door is Love.   

The lamp,  

always burning, is beautiful,  

a vault opening,  

a memorial.   

 

In the city, her windows 

bear victory 

in the apocalypse, 

 

in the rising.

 

 

 

Mars, Father 

 

You glow, burnished red,  

rocky coasts 

ripe with water-memory. 

Satellite moons preserve  

your history of fire 

in perfect memorials. 

 

Long ago, vital cargo 

was stolen and stowed  

on shards of you, 

broken off and tossed in our laps, 

to rot or flourish. 

 

Somehow, we bubbled to life  

in a trapping of gases. 

An arbitrary warring of elements. 

Where your home diminished,  

we flowered.   

 

In turn, you suffered 

crashed arrivals that cratered  

your skin in ruptures.   

Because we share remorseless space, 

what we jettisoned, you received. 

 

We live now in the shadow  

of losses, gains. 

Our cells carry survivors’ guilt,  

the ache of our ascendence 

in your lessening.

Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have appeared in Steam Ticket, Cimarron Review, Evening Street Review, Inflection Review, and Blueline Magazine, among others. She is the editor and publisher of the Oregon Poetry Calendar.  Having authored four chapbooks, her full-length volume, Going Out to Gather has been published by Fernwood Press.  Her poetry has been nominated multiple times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart prize.