|
Acorn People
Nutshell heads already wearing hats
were wired to pipe-stem cleaner bodies,
dressed in scraps of calico and felt.
We borrowed our mothers' pinking shears,
glued yarn to brims and crowns,
exaggerated eyelashes, expressions of bliss.
Impermanent as autumn or my father
dying on a bed in our living room,
the acorn people slept on moss
beneath quilts of red and yellow leaves,
and desired nothing but to be bent
into affectations of dance.
How benign, the crayoned smiles,
the malleable limbs clutching
tufts of marigold and ivy.
They must have become dismantled
after my father died and winter
flocked their once bright linens with frost.
Those curious faces sprouting roots
deep enough to grow new limbs,
each season a ripple widening
inside a torso sound as stone.
There are shadows now, dancing
on the path beneath the oak trees;
I pass through them again on a morning walk.
- And the acorns are everywhere--
Full Moon
None of us could sleep.
Roofs and lawns opaline
between razored shadows.
Bald light unfolding pastures.
Ponds rife with surfacing fish.
In the morning we found
earthworms-- magnetized
from underground channels
and mushrooms duplicated
through powdery rings.
Oh yes, the dark house
keened gently
with the tide of our breathing.
Still, there was a reverberation
in the eaves as if something lost
had become disquieted.
Pale light striking--
a calibrated shaft.
Midwives swear by it.
When more babies are thrust
blue-white from the womb.
We all felt it and stirred,
cobwebbed beneath
our thread-counted sheets.
Didn't my daughter come to me
in the night and whisper
something about a sound
beneath her bed? Open your door
and let it out, I recall murmuring
and then turned the pillow,
whole and cool and white,
to the other side.
The Beautiful Dog
The county workers have come with shovels
to lift the beautiful dog from the side of the road.
Someone will cry tonight and wonder
where he is, curse broken leashes
or hinges nosed open.
Someone will call his name again and again,
and think how he would circle
the same worn flannelled spot--
curl in and sigh.
Someone will cry tonight and remember
how the broken dog
made it to the side of the road
before he fell.
Someone will let the image
circle through her head all day--
praise anonymity, grieve randomness.
Someone will cry tonight
with resolute joy when I come home,
and quiver and dance and speak of love
in sharp guttural intonations.
Someone will pull my laundry
from the hamper in the morning
and sleep on it by the front door,
while waiting for the sun to circle the sky.
Someone sheltered, beloved, defined by territory,
dreaming of places feral as highways.
Laura Sobbott Ross has been nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize, and has had poetry published in New Millennium Writings, The Arkansas Review, The White Pelican Review, Kalliope, The Caribbean Writer, and the Baker's Dozen Literary Review, among others. She has poetry forthcoming in The Sow's Ear Poetry Review and The William and Mary Review, and has placed first in poetry contests for the 2006 Mount Dora, Florida Literary Festival and the Great Blue Beacon. Ross is a freelance architectural designer. (June 2008)