Puckerbrush Review

WINTER / SPRING 2008

P. 106-110

Kennedy, Five Poems
Continued

Weather

With your father you play
Chess now or other mind games
Debate history or modern questions

With me it’s music
We take turns choosing songs
Why, you ask, are jazz tunes

Always about weather
Nothing but raindrops
Or blue skies

The sun
Burning through in
Its neat orange round

As it did the summer
Of your brother’s dying
In a bad sea in

Stormy weather
The light filling in
As we left the coastal town

Sharpening the horizon
While you watched, white faced
Biting your lip, the tears riding down.

For The Roses
Lillian B. Kennedy

for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at
—T.S. Eliot

In mid-summer, two weeks before and after the Fourth of July, the roses by
my back porch bloom with a passion. I claim only a light tending, but I hold
them in high regard. I could say I loved them and wondered if they knew.
At midnight, mid-summer, there is no boundary between the wild, white
blossoms and the wild, white stars. And they are nameless. I once took one
to an expert, and he wondered aloud how “Old Blush” could survive in a
zone too cold. But I’ve watched them through twenty winters, and my
favorite of all—the spring blizzard. All lights in the dark, snow clung to
the back screen door. I pushed it open to let the dog go out. Our eyes were

stinging, but the roses—stalks, hips and thorns—were standing watch.

Two poems
Claire Millikin

Elegy Of House

The day they moved her from her house,
packing almost nothing, carrying only
the tea towels and tea pot,
she did not turn back.
Across the fields the first light cleaning up
detritus of storm, plums
flat open on the earth
like a field of blood,
her hands opened, her hand
on the doorknob a startled bird.

In the fields the gleaners
afterwards knelt. Women
gather what their hands
must touch, the ravaged fruit
still edible. A woman’s eye
takes in the house
she is leaving, the gleaners
clean the story away.

Fox

Early spring, so lean
your legs shine like ribbons,
an undulant gait, down a gray lane
towards what was once, years back,
a retreat for the mentally disturbed,
now a luxury cul-de-sac
fronting the nacreous ocean.

You move quicker than grass
shaken in the wind’s
whitening hiss,
your body all held taut,
listening in its arc.

Listening is your element
A story should be told,

but I cannot bear to tell it.

When I speak, combing
my breath into voice,
you vanish,
like the scarce trace
of waves on rock.

For years I’ve run this path,

dead-end, to the hard Atlantic,
and still there rest these
old, untended graves:
A mother and child,
buried together
under one name,

the only story left

them, under a sky
dry and bright and hard,
like the wood of a board
bleached-out, abandoned for years,
at the ocean’s ashen reach,
a fractioned, purchased sea.