Two Poems: Raspberries; The Blue Heron

Raspberries

In those last pictures of you
your hair is red
but not the red of raspberries

that grow feral and fierce
in the green mountains
that surround you.

No, rather the red
of maples that snap
and burn, sap running

strong and persistent,
even as days grow cold,
and you at the old

maple table, writing love
poems to a dead man,
poems that gallop

across fields to rest
in your hands,
or perhaps at the window

of your house, bought
and paid for with poems,
poems only you could catch

by the tail. A house filled
with the voices of daughters:
those greengage plums,

and the ghost of a man, silk
tie around his neck. Outside
the musky orchard,

thorny tangle of raspberries
that flower early
with the smell of peonies

in bloom, alive
with bees, and later
the sweet fruit,

color of a woman’s mouth,
that if left behind
dry and fade.

And later still, you who were born
between the poem and the drum
in the confused library

of the female mind,
will be buried
amongst the raspberries.

And in the violet shadows
of winter’s shorter days,
the clean crunch of snow,

the maples holding up
their empty arms,
the orchard quiet,

raspberry canes will continue
to push up from beneath
the world’s white ice.

 

The Blue Heron

She arrives at a lake held in the palm of five mountains,
steep and sharp as teeth or the prongs of God’s thorny crown.

The night throws a gloamy blanket down around her.
She seeks a place deep enough to decant herself, to separate

her past from her future. Naked, she slips down, cradled
in supple marsh grass and catches her breath at the sight of a blue heron,

its spiked tiara bristling as it stretches back its head, loosens its wings
and lifts itself into the night. She stands, the water sluicing down her body,

leaving her palpable in the gathering gloom, as she opens her arms wide,
breathes out, and releases herself to her own wild soaring.