Totem Beasts

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.