Thursday, April 17, 2008

no cinnamon, but lilacs & summer

A few poems by Wendy Morton, a poet & private investigator.


LOVE ISN’T

thunder and cinnamon.
Is: walls the colour of Provence;
seagulls framed in the skylight,
between clouds and the morning moon;
hoya trailing night perfume;
a level floor;
a new sink;
your hands.

IN THIS SMALL ROOM WITH LILACS:
ESL on Linden Street

I’ve arrived to read them poems.
I explain the word pomegranate:
say: red, round, sweet, rubies,
and they smile, nod.
Yes, says Ludmilla,
in the Ukraine, the same.
Osmany, from Cuba says,
sometime we have them a Christmas.
Yes, he says, rubies.

I move on to starfish,
show them the ones on my bracelet.
Say how they cling to rocks at low tide,
in a magenta wash.
Soo Jin, says in Korea they are
sometimes the colour of the sun.

Then red-winged blackbirds,
I show them a picture;
tell them how I hear their song
like falling water, when I shower outside
each morning.

Outside, even in winter? Asks Alexandra,
imagining Russian ice and snowdrift.
Even in winter, I say.

But this spring, there are ravens,
hummingbirds,
the music of blackbirds,
that I hear every morning,
speaking a language
I can’t understand.


SUMMER

I’m in the back garden,
dead-heading fuchsias
at summer’s end.
Around me are poppies
and the perfume of stargazer lilies.

I’m thinking of how this summer
of death has so quickly passed.
My friend’s father,
dead suddenly at his desk.

Another friend’s mother
with cancer of the pancreas,
stopped eating, died with grace.

My mother. And her slow dying.
Her mind gone,
she sleeps all day.
Imagines, when awake,
she’s on a cruise ship.
Music and dancing
under the stars.
Stargazer lilies everywhere.
Perhaps she could waltz. Not this summer.
Not this.
Summer.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Heather: I really am enjoying your poems this month. Especially the last one here, the Summer poem.

the redhead said...

Thanks, Abby! I'm having fun with it, for sure.