What Remains
The full moon fades to a rattle of geese.
Last evening the male and female cardinals
took turns at the margin
of light and dark
a flare of notes sent up,
a soft answer cupping my ear,
then nothing.
This morning while I write, one ant
bears the corpse of its sister
along the border of my pages
to lettuces gleaming in the kitchen midden.
Rinds, shells, crumbs of a loaf,
black sand of French Roast
could all be evidence in a dig.
What will it say of us?
That we were drinkers of coffee?
eaters of blueberries?
The ants and crickets know what’s left
a rumor a heartbeat
those silent red canyons
of morning and evening
where sun and moon meet
in the same sky.
Sycamore in Autumn
Spirit haunted, caught
in an aura of terror and delight.
The more you gaze at it, the more
it trembles. Each fold dissolves
into an ever thinner veil
less and less of what you see—
not in, but through the tree.
The river that lies behind shimmers
more insistently in the sudden flicks
of light between the disintegrating
leaves and asks you, even as you stand
in the stillness of the morning,
what’s left?
What matches this fierce shivering and shedding?
How will you clamber through
to this vibrating silence which shakes,
shakes from your old skin,
your worn-out, greying self-that-was,
and lets you loose,
naked and glowing?
Mary Kay Rummel’s ninth poetry book, Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone, was published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Previous books have won awards from New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Blue Light Press. She is Poet Laureate emerita of Ventura County, CA. and finishing a volume of new and selected works to be published by Blue Light Press this spring. Mary Kay has performed her poetry in many venues in the US, Ireland and England and taught poetry classes and led workshops for all ages and groups of students and is a founding member of the Ventura County Poetry Project.
The full moon fades to a rattle of geese.
Last evening the male and female cardinals
took turns at the margin
of light and dark
a flare of notes sent up,
a soft answer cupping my ear,
then nothing.
This morning while I write, one ant
bears the corpse of its sister
along the border of my pages
to lettuces gleaming in the kitchen midden.
Rinds, shells, crumbs of a loaf,
black sand of French Roast
could all be evidence in a dig.
What will it say of us?
That we were drinkers of coffee?
eaters of blueberries?
The ants and crickets know what’s left
a rumor a heartbeat
those silent red canyons
of morning and evening
where sun and moon meet
in the same sky.
Sycamore in Autumn
Spirit haunted, caught
in an aura of terror and delight.
The more you gaze at it, the more
it trembles. Each fold dissolves
into an ever thinner veil
less and less of what you see—
not in, but through the tree.
The river that lies behind shimmers
more insistently in the sudden flicks
of light between the disintegrating
leaves and asks you, even as you stand
in the stillness of the morning,
what’s left?
What matches this fierce shivering and shedding?
How will you clamber through
to this vibrating silence which shakes,
shakes from your old skin,
your worn-out, greying self-that-was,
and lets you loose,
naked and glowing?
Mary Kay Rummel’s ninth poetry book, Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone, was published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Previous books have won awards from New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Blue Light Press. She is Poet Laureate emerita of Ventura County, CA. and finishing a volume of new and selected works to be published by Blue Light Press this spring. Mary Kay has performed her poetry in many venues in the US, Ireland and England and taught poetry classes and led workshops for all ages and groups of students and is a founding member of the Ventura County Poetry Project.
