Poems and Other Short Pieces Looking for a Home

Wood Lot

I count the cobbles on the beach

while we wait for the breakers to rise from the swell of the sea

and race up the steep cobble shoulder of the shore

with one final delivery of cedar

on back order from some river in Canada.

Lost lumber tumbles onto the greywacke shingle

Where sawmill planks rub their edges

round on the cobbles

and scour their tattoos with sand.

Blue spruces tumble from the bluff

to roll in the sand with their boughs

around a birch of another river

all hoarded by the storm

in this bite of shore left open to the sea.

  

Things I Hate

I’m offended by inspirational Facebook posts

by women telling men how they should act. 

I’m irritated by drivers who speed up in passing zones

after driving slow for the last fifty miles.

I dread that endless split-second one spends anticipating pain between falling . . .

and landing on ice.

        Two Young Women in the Rain

I watched two young women walking 

the roadside in the rain 

with a dog that I didn’t notice.  

They appeared through the windshield, fresh and fertile like newly furrowed fields, dampened by the rain and ready for seed, looking up as I passed, faces smiling 

at me.  

And, 

for a moment 

driving to the post office in the rain,

the open pedals of their moist red lips made me warm. 

Eating

              We ate beans, 

beans with cornbread, beans with homemade cottage cheese off the back of the woodstove. 

Red beans, white beans, pintos, a lot of beans. 

              We ate potatoes,

potatoes with gravy, potatoes we dug from the cold wet fall ground. 

Fresh potatoes, boiled potatoes, swede potatoes. 

              We ate salmon,

salmon out of the river, salmon out of jars from the musty root cellar. 

Pink salmon, red salmon, king salmon, smoked. 

            We ate moose,

moose in stew, moose burger sandwiches on homemade bread. 

Tough moose, tender moose, poached moose, moose track stew.    

We ate food so good that I didn’t know we were poor, 

food so good I didn’t know people with money didn’t eat like that.