Happy to say my book Totem Beasts will be published by Big Table in 2017. Here's the eponymous poem, appropriate for this time of year (collage at right is the book cover).
There are no ghosts in this house.
No hem of a muslin dress
draped over a riser.
No Emily Dickinson
archetype
figured prominently at the banister.
No face in the naked
glass.
The boreal firs, always a regiment,
are noble, melancholic
as the
tide bathes the sedge.
We listen for what the hayfield
says.
We
wait
for totem beasts, but no coyote
parts these
fallow fields. No moose.
No
osprey in wake of wind.
Quotidian, these crows,
those gulls.
I am filled with pale green air.
My sister's child thumps
in Utero.
Clouds snuff the sun, the sacrament,
the
fiery heart.
Night comes.
I sit quietly inside myself.
My father bows his head
here,
the lines echoing
around his eyes.
