A Thin Place of Another Sort
No order or law we know explains the consort
of lure and lore, or why a bridge which soars
four dozen feet above a gorge in Dumbarton,
Scotland, compels dogs both small and large
to jump its parapets to their breakage or death.
What causes it, one local asserts, is the heady
scent of animals below which drives dogs quite
mad. . . . Mad or not, three hundred have leapt
into the hushed plush crevasse through which
the Overtoun burn wends its green stitchery,
having drawn dozens of them, already unsound
and spellbound, into its watery depths to drown.
Others, airborne from parapets closer to entry
points onto the bridge, find a more temporary
rest in the gossamery ferns along the burn’s
mossy berm. Our resident spirit here spurs
them on, happy to steward their mortal race,
another local insists. That specter, Mrs. Grace
White, her name the only import given her
at birth and marriage, is most often referred
to now as the White Lady of Overtoun House
who, for three decades, refused to renounce
widow’s weeds as she mourned her beloved.
She appears irregularly, ghosting her leaded
casements overlooking the gorge, and, less
often, drifting in her fallow garden’s gorse,
though she and the dogs, in the way of all such
thin places, remain aloof and predictably mute.
*This poem originally appeared in the journal Mezzo Cammin,
Vol.15, Issue 1, under the title “A Thin Place.”
The Abandoned Greenhouse
Certain herbs are thought
to lessen impaired cognition...
—American Herbalist Guild
Little cathedral of iron and glass,
of arch, mullion, and broken apse,
the faint twilit specters of rarified
flora you once coddled electrifies
us but briefly, for year upon year
you litter anew in dross. What fear
have we then in being drawn here
to the site of your ruin but the clear
sense of our own, which day by day
plays out beyond this wasted acre.
Thus we come for the sovereignty
of nature loosed, its sprung bounty
occupying each inch of your ambit
our pharmacopeia: yellow circlets
of bristling autumn hawkbit lodged
among the stalks of fringed sedges,
mild lemon balm growing wild
in the higher compromised aisles,
and, on the verges, flanks of downy
roseroot abounding—yes, beauty
about—and each herb a tacit conduit
to the wherewithal to remember it.
*This poem first appeared in Mad River Review, Vol. 5, Issue 1
Last Easter, in the Village Graveyard,
My Husband Manifested as Spring
Amber and diaphanous as a cloud
at sunset, his spirit hovered above his stone,
assessing my every step in this temporal world.
How do you know it’s me, he asked,
when all of us look alike in our astral state,
a recompense given us, an oddly ironic tactic,
neither completely female nor male,
but redolent of each. Yet, because I inhabit
my earthly self and breathe, I was loathe to praise
him or lecture him on the vernal
scope of the afterlife. Instead I extolled horses
that carry us through it, manes woven with seasonal
lilies and strands of silver, their teeth
creamy as alabaster. Do you see their progeny
in the pasture? I asked. Why not offer them sweet
carrots, or oats, or corn, and profess
your love for them? But he, as was his wont,
morphed into the darkening dusk as he ascended
in a vapor. Still, I expect this spectacle
again, challenging, or arresting me otherwise,
for there exists here ample portals of departure.
In the House of Spirits
I live in a haunted house, built originally in Rhode Island in 1761 by Daniel Thornton.
Thornton’s spirit traveled with the house to Ohio and abides here now, as does my husband.
My husband, joining ranks with Daniel Thornton,
loiters with him in the library, examining scores
of London books. Afterwards they will drift among
the upstairs chambers, two specters of glimmering
light devising in death what they rarely imagined
in life, surveying each of our soon to be slumbering
or sleepless guests. Yet the impositions they bring
to us awake or asleep we have grown accustomed
to as they cast our windows open to the icy fissures
of winter storms or the smoky influx of fouled air,
or disrupt our new water furnace and its heated
or cooled flow. Meddle they may but have a flair
for mindless intercessions. Still, if we broadcast
our plight to the cosmos, we shall be humbled,
struck ineloquent, and denied any sort of respite.
My husband, however, once again having masked
his face with his cap at the usual inopportune
moment, materializes in and out the door, a prank
he performs each night, though we no longer react
with laughter. For we are notably less malleable
and surmise he will find his rightful place of rest
in good time. Or he may dither, that stubborn man.
But for now he and Thornton espouse the moon,
huge and orange, as they ply their evening amble.
Did I Ever Really Know You
Did I ever really know you, figment
of my heart, or merely conjure you whole,
faithless to all but your fleshly existence?
Did I ever really know you, figment
of my heart, your finely-honed brilliance
abetting your brash and riven soul.
Did I ever really know you, figment
of my heart, or merely conjure you whole?
Myrna Stone is the author of six full-length books of poetry: The Resurrectionist’s Diary (Dos Madres Press, 2021); Luz Bones (Etruscan Press, 2017); In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father (White Violet Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Casanova Chronicles (Etruscan Press, 2010), a finalist for the 2011 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; How Else to Love the World (Browser Book Publishing, 2007); and The Art of Loss (Michigan State University Press, 2001), for which she was named 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year.
She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Poetry Award from Weber, The Contemporary West. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, River Styx and Southwest Review, among many others. Myrna's poems have also appeared in sixteen anthologies including Flora Poetica: The Chatty Book of Botanical Verse.
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