POET OF THE DAY: ISABEL ZUBER

My good friend Isabel Zuber is both poet and novelist. We met 30 years ago at a writers conference led by A.R. Ammons in Critz, Va. A native of Boone, NC, she has lived her adult life in Winston-Salem. Her first novel Salt was published by Picador, and her chapbooks of poems have been published by the NC Writers Network (Annual chapbook award) and Persephone Press. More of her work may be found in the archives of ncarts.org, as well as in several anthologies, the most recent being Southern Appalachian Poets (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/) and Clothes Lines. The following poems are from her forthcoming full-length collection Red Lily (Press 53)

Nightward


A last enormous freedom

is to run into the dark,

barely enough day left

to see vague hydrangeas

massed along the drive
and junipers up like spears

against the sky. Bound then

in the dusk with all that

can be there light says is not.

Rush the yard on grass-lashed,

bug-bit legs, turn round

and round till stars collide

with spires, breaking the

huge dinning noise

of all those tiny voices.

Such venture is less, or more,

than brave, for dew’s sweet

or bitter, and there’s always

the lighted doorway and

the sense that if one runs

far and hard enough

there are arms in the darkness also.

Whale Walk

These days they move with flippers, fins and flukes,
not feet, yet in time more than ancient
they walked. And they got around,
left pieces of themselves, a femur, pelvic nub,
bits of toes, to fossilize in Pakistan, Egypt,
Georgia and other places. Imagine
how those feet must have hurt.

Seated somewhere by a temperate shore,
tempted to dabble in the surf, they discovered
it felt good. So why not?
Earth takes several million turns
and there they are back in the water.
swimming and singing to each other
unbothered by bunions or blisters,

nothing to fear after millennia except
giant squid and small people.