Poet's Corner: 27 April 2011
Poet's Corner offers poetry written by Maine poets as a cultural service. We are pleased to present poems this week by Leah C. Stetson and C. Marecic. As always, the ideas expressed are the poets' own.
IF I WERE AN ISLAND
For Jodie
If I were an island, I’d be lined with rocks and seaweed;
My pebbled beaches strewn with pieces of brick and shell,
Sea glass: blue cobalt, milky, blood red, bottle green,
And sprigs of salt grass, sea lavender and rusty nails.
Up close I am not pristine.
After I’ve cried, even from laughing too hard —
A nor’easter — blades of eel grass lash together,
Drying in the sunshine, flaked and sticky as eyelids
Squinting through sea mist that makes boats slip
And nimble feet grip, then muckle onto anything rigid.
The air around me is an unpredictable weather.
Leave my shore and find an unkempt shady haven:
Moss and wildflowers, tall pines with an osprey nest,
Beds of long grasses flattened by deer, or some fairy maiden,
Who once reclined there to read tea leaves, or rest,
Doe-eyed and dreamy, she smelled sweet fern and breathed deeply.
My spirit is both wakeful and sleepy.
Hidden farther in, a grey-shingled cottage sits on millstone.
In bad winter storms, the stocky house has trembled
but stayed intact. Inside the rooms are cozy, decorated in cool earth tones.
Stacks of books and magazines and papers and things assembled
themselves on a big heavy wood desk. Jars held pens and the odd razor clam.
Such well-ordered chaos I, too, have resembled.
If I were an island, I’d float with thousands beside me
an archipelago dotted like gull droppings along the Maine coast.
I’d be a curled shaving off the glacial sculpture; a jagged, leaning, steep
Lopsided pose. I rose… out of the depths, the Gulf Stream, a hot ghost.
Rosa rugosa spread its salty pink blossoms and thorny
Silk petals to lure artists and poets and tourists and pirates.
I let them come but I don’t make it easy.
Leah C. Stetson
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LAST NIGHT A DOG BARKED
Last night a dog barked
at the wind through the trees
once again confounding fear
wildness and boredom
like a religious zealot
lost in the labyrinth of justifications
placing hope in the
off chance that rustling leaves or
creaking branches belie something more ominous
than the distant rumble of thunder portends.
Only rain.
Yet, those ears habituated to years of complicit domesticity --
cars grumbling down the dirt driveway,
droning television commercials, a fork scratching a dinner plate, or
a perpetually leaking faucet --
hear the taunt of the wild in every single thing outside
like coyote laughter
and this alone puts them on edge.
C. Marecic
