EASTER: FOR JIM ON SILER'S BALD

(Photo credit: www.hikingthesmokys.blogspot.com)

Today is my husband's birthday. We have been married 41 years, which is hard to believe. I wrote this poem shortly after we were married. I think it's a perfect Easter poem, as well as a birthday celebration.

For Jim On Siler's Bald

Dizzy with you on the edge,
after what seemed like hours of climbing
toward sunlight, I stepped
back and studied a hawk floating
over the valley like a kite

somebody let go of. Why speak
of life changing its seasons
again? How the hardwoods
bore leaves into view or
the bears brushed off sleep
like a cobweb to follow the light
growing long on the leafmold
where earthworms fished,
busy as fingers? That happened

as always. But wind?
I remember the hawk riding
on it to nowhere I knew
when we lay down in thin air
to sleep with the rest of the creatures
the earth was about to awaken.

"For Jim On Siler's Bald" appeared in The Girl In the Midst of the Harvest (Texas Tech University Press, 1986).

ANNIVERSARY

Our first "real" date was a hike.




And that poem ended up in my first book, in 1986, after years of submissions to one contest after another.



(Texas Tech University Press, AWP Award Series, chosen by John Frederick Nims)

Marriage is a lot like Poetry: You have to be willing to stay with it for the long haul. Or, the long hike!

Drought

Drought

The smell of dirt, always
the smell of dry dirt down in Georgia
where I sweated through summer,
my father complaining about the blue sky
stretching all the way west into Arkansas.
Dry ice they’d tumble
from planes sometimes. Thunder
and strong wind might come

but no rain. The pigs grumbled
from sunup to sundown. The cows stood
immobilized under the oak trees,
their turds turning black as the biscuits I burned
while I daydreamed. Where I played I saw corn dying
year after year, teased by dust devils
leaving their dust in between my toes
and in ring after ring round my neck. I scrubbed
ring after ring of black dirt from the bathtub
at night. I got used to my own sweat

and so much hot weather
the silly petunias collapsed
by mid-afternoon. Without looking I knew what
I’d find, the whole flower bed lazy

as I was. You hold up
your shoulders straight, I heard a thousand times.
Books on my head, I’d be sent out
to water the flowers as if that would help salvage
anything but my good humor, the smell of wet dirt

my reward, for which I knew I ought
to be grateful. I am
grateful, now that I’m thirsty as dry land

I stand upon, stoop-shouldered,
wanting a flash flood to wash away Georgia
while I aim the water hose into a sad patch of pansies
as if nothing’s changed. I can still hear my father complain
while my mother cooks supper and I swear to leave
home tomorrow. In Oregon dams burst
but I don’t believe it. Here water is
only illusion, an old trick
light plays on the high way that runs north
through field after field after field.


from The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, Texas Tech University Press, 1986, AWP Award Series