POET OF THE DAY: Kathryn Kirkpatrick

I've long admired Kathryn Kirkpatrick's poetry. A fine scholar and teacher in the English Department at Appalachian State University, she has published work in many of the nation's best journals, including two of my favorites, CAVE WALL and SHENANDOAH. Her book OUT OF THE GARDEN was published by Mayapple Press four years ago. The following two poems are from her forthcoming book, ALTER, to be published by Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC. Kathryn is a long-distance friend, one I wish I could see more often.

Finding the Heart

Under the hydrangea, a heart

the dogs have found, a deer's

left by a hunter in our woods,

the carcass gutted where it lay, and I,

having never seen anything

like it, larger than anyone's fist

I know of, fetch the shovel because

it is so newly out of the body,

I am sure it was beating

only yesterday or the day before

and so bare beside the knife's

fresh cut and so powerful, somehow,

as if it did the work of living

still that I cannot bear

this awful cleaving from

the breath it made

and I dig a small grave.

Chemotherapy

Up from the massage table

I catch sight of myself

in the unavoidable mirror.

Afternoon light doesn't blink.

Basic bald head. Bare pudendum.

Soft pile of belly and hips.

Once mirrors drew me like friends,

broke my gloomy moods

with a smile, eyes brighter

than I'd remembered. Now I'm sacra

to myself, a neutral suggestion,

transpersonal form. Stripped

to Neolithic goddess, I'm all

that's behind all that will ever be,

prima mater, prima material,

impersonal as rain, kneaded

to dozens of shapes, except

that my chest is scarred

which is what you'd expect

of a goddess in this 21^st century.