WRITINGS

“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”