Wedding Poems
Nuit de juin ! Dix-sept ans ! - On se laisse griser.
La sève est du champagne et vous monte à la tête...
On divague ; on se sent aux lèvres un baiser
Qui palpite là, comme une petite bête..
- from Roman, by Arthur Rimbaud
Translation:
June night! Seventeen years ! - We let ourselves
get drunk.
The sap is champagne and goes to your head...
We wander; we feel a kiss on our lips
Which throbs there, like a little animal..
Knots
For a long while this place didn’t know me.
The rain came and went according
to its own life, the metronome drip from the eaves
stately with history.
Every day I was an exception.
The floorboards discussed my bare feet.
But sometimes in the seconds
between sleeping and waking
a swiftness caught me up,
as if I were glimpsed
in the corner of an eye, fleeting,
my importance unfixed.
I took my cues from the late afternoon light,
touched what it touched,
ran my fingers along the edges of picture frames,
followed the bright hair on your arm
upward to the curve of shoulder.
Everywhere I touched a small knot tied itself:
clove hitch, cat’s paw, angler’s loop.
And in the end these hold.
The rain lingers, floorboards swell.
Your slumbering arm across my hip
fastens us in our own designs.
- Lori Powell
Winter poem
Who knew it would be winter?
Hands down we’d thought the fall
knowing nothing of Michaelmas
yet proclaiming it our own, toasting
from both sides of the continent: Maine
to Seattle, a three hour phone call
laced with whiskey, blackberries,
and the stuff of medieval feasts:
smoked goose, bannock bread, secret verses, all
shared at a remove
of three thousand miles. Still
we keep that phone call, and still
we call it Michaelmas.
But look! The snow that came
to bind us hadn’t fallen then, had yet
to gloss our face, glazing
our corneas as we refused to close a single eye,
had yet to salt your hair, my beard
with promises of the future
as it would
within those fir and cedar
haunts, the ones we’d glide, nervous
at dusk in the high Cascades,
believing something, some stark
and lovely thing,
there in the Trollhaugen cold
was lurking.
And we waited, giddy with exalted
shivering ‘til it came, bound
in our boots, slip soled,.
spear tipped and nimbly
gloved, banishing always
the spring, seeing
we may not play
always
in the cold
In time perhaps,
the midnight sun,
or even a middling equinox
will beckon, then we’ll garden
and barbecue with abandon
but now, just
now, it’s we three, this ménage
à froid: you, me
and the forever falling mercury.
- Jeff Baker
Waiting for Snow
At night you clear a space on the railing for new snow to fall.
You have a bent for reckoning, and you’re patient:
you watch, you wait, then you measure. Soon flakes
swarm under the porch light like bees settling:
bees of light in a hive of light. They’ve blown from the swollen
fields of the sky. Now they want to embrace everything.
In the yard the next morning, there are no longer
any hard edges, only curved, gravid shapes.
With one hand you sink your coffee mug into the white
arm of the railing. With the other you insert the ruler: four
and one quarter inches. You pick up your coffee mug
and step back into the kitchen where your lover is pushing
her hair from her face. You realize all this time
you’ve been hoping she would wake, and now she has.
- Lori Powell
Avalanche Dreams
Still the glow of blue
Christmas lights buried
in the snow, where a timer
ticks the bulbs, day
and night, off
and on.
No one sees or knows
We leave them lit. Back
at Thanksgiving we bent
low, threading the stiff
green wires through squat
yew hedges
and the lights were barely
knee high, now
February’s drifted
past our waist, still
We don’t pull the plug.
Who knows what miracles
We’re illuminating down there?
Might an ermine, no….
a family!
of them: eyes
and tail tips all
fierce black embers,
come tunneling
over from the woodpile,
break dimly
into the frozen
cerulean mist
beneath the yews, only
to pause, blinking,
for a heartbeat?
Because that
would be enough. More
than enough, as even nothing
is enough: just the thought,
luminous as lava, miles deep in the earth.
- Jeff Baker
Rings and photo of rings: Liz Stefany,