“Coming Home to Memoir, U.K., Combined Academic Presses Blog, May 8, 2017
Three poems, published in “Poetic Congeries,” ed. John Hoppenthaler, Connotations Press.
©Denise Low 2014. Email for permissions. If not-for-profit, permission, upon notification, may be granted.
PARALLAX
Eye of the backyard fox
caught on night film
occipital orb flash white
void encircled by night
how geometry of round
fits a cutout eclipse
exact day-night balance
sun-moon equation of orbit.
how harvest moon’s oval
casts hills in slant light
scarlet lens to sight aim
how it shifts everything.
LOST
Lost? Yes, again the stars fall
on 13th Street where a house, now demolished,
was my home. I was young.
Funeral dirges sound from the building
and hearses ferry the dead. I was young
and swung on the backyard tire swing
one late October afternoon under red leaves
drifting like red stars to my feet.
I was young and then was gone like the house.
An old woman remains in my place.
TWO GATES
I look through glass and see a young woman
of twenty, washing dishes, and the window
turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago.
She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot
I still own. I see her outline against lamplight;
she knows only her side of the pane. The porch
where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear
water run in the sink as she lowers her head,
blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist.
I step forward for a better look and she dissolves
into lumber and paint. A gate I passed through
to the next life loses shape. Once more I stand
squared into the present, among maple trees
and scissor-tailed birds, in a garden, almost
a mother to that faint, distant woman.
Blue Lyra Review June, 2014, “Crop Duster Plane” and “Garden of William Burroughs”