Buffleheads / by Lorraine Claggett
Easter’s full moon has made a silver coin on the river
Stilled by a windless morning.
There is no movement save for the tiny ducks,
Reluctant migrants, still sojourning
In their winter refuge.
Held enthralled I watch their happy motions
Effortlessly sliding over the watery surface
They meet fellow travelers
And grouping in small coteries, glide along together.
When suddenly the first ducks head down
The others follow one by one and all are gone below.
I remain deserted.
Until, one by one, each pops up
In unexpected places; and I breathe again,
Observer to the return of greetings and groupings,
All glad to be together under the brightening day.
When, once more, each goes under singly
To where there is no sun.
The buffleheads live in two worlds
As so do I.
Timberdoodling / by April Claggett
Just when you think nothing more can possibly be done with this day
And the prop-setter sun has fussed too long, scurried off-stage
–House lights down—
The audience reproves with restlessness
having paid the price
for this dead-serious drama
that is New Hampshire spring—
that is, proof of promises kept.
But first, ladybugs and germs, our comedic opener:
The timberdoodle waddles onto the stage
Hands-tied and Pinocchi-nosed,
Nasally beeping its one froggy note
Even motherly moon, smiling down,
Can’t smooth over and pat down this anomaly.
Peent. Peent. Peent.
The joke is on us, of course.
The second it ceases you want it back
So badly the fishing line of your heart
Unspools dizzyingly out
–hooked as it is on absence–
then locks on a faint twitter
Now impossibly, escapably high
for a bogsucker–turned sky dancer–
Telegraphing respectable bird-code.
Beseech all you will,
its sudden plunging return from infinity
knifing nose down and warbling reverse arias
somehow ends up right
–wild silent applause–
with its doe-eyed doddering
reset to peent
in future blueberry fields.
Easter Mourning 2021 / by Lorraine Claggett
Spring has worked her magic to bring full color to the Easter parade
And is ready for the Day
Her cherry trees outline the lanes in yards of frothy white
Daffodils in yellow spool along roadsides and
Out along the meadow tiny flower heads of blue and white
Are quilted in the grasses
My dormant garden has sprouted six crimson tulips to be the crowning color of the
Easter morning.
.
Weather forecast: Colder and rain on Thursday and Friday with outlook for sun and warm
temperatures on Easter Day
Before Easter Sunday there is Good Friday.
Thursday has already darkened and rain begins again. The paper reads
“A seven-year-old girl out for recess with her first grade class sees her beloved friend
shot dead by a passing teenager with a gun, has not returned to school.”
She cannot go back.
Forgive them Father. They know not what they do.
News, Boulder, Colorado: A gunman opens fire on shoppers at a grocery store and eleven are
dead.
Atlanta, Georgia: In a shooting spree, six women at work and three men were killed by a
roaming assailant.
Forgive them Father. Forgive them.
Friday is the good day. It is called Good.
Under the spring rain the flowers that droop now will be bright again
The children will have pandemic plastic eggs, no candy, no dying.
In four other cities there are mass killings in one week. Mourning is there.
To have Easter Sunday, there must be death.
Forgive me Father, I do not know what to do.
To my mother’s despair at Easter / by April Claggett
Attend instead to the arc of the egg
Adore how it curves
In sliding ratios
–now the gentle belly of a whale
–here the memory of your baby’s heel
–here a mathematician’s mushroom cap
Over and over without omega
A soft/hard strong/fragile strange/intimate
Orthodox paradox
It turns out
A cosmos in your cupped hand
Forgive the egg
For what it cannot do
For it is blind and dumb
For it cannot stand alone
And it must be nested
A mute universe
Pointing to nothing
Easter Morning / by Lorraine Claggett
Easter morning and the sun is out
Burning away the dark hours of Friday with the color of new growth,
Shuttering away somber omens of the Sabbath,
And now, with the new day,
A wonder.
It is after the bustle of waffles for breakfast,
Baskets ribboned and gathered, shoes found and matched,
In the old house the silent Meeting gathers
Where young and old again dig deep into spirit,
Waiting.
What had happened?
In the spring of the year the age-old story is retold
The miracles are gathered to process,
And the meaning of death
Is asked
There is no reply, no path to explanations.
There remains only the comfort of asking
And the happiness of wonder;
To hold wonder as the work of the soul.
To behold.
As for the miracle, it is real, testified by
The centuries of folks gathered on Easter, on any Sunday,
Trees in leaf, flowers underfoot, children running circles,
Together weeping, caring, knowing joy
And love.
Recurring / by April Claggett
The moon woke me up
Or so it seemed
A thick cantaloupe slice
rocking on the small of the back of the far hillside
To me, on my hillside, in my house made of wood.
And, as lovers love only one,
And I the only one awake in the world,
It was me she stirred.
We locked eyes across the swales
of whishing pine tops and sucking bog ponds winking up as mica.
But what did she see in me
on such a seductive night
Save two tiny watery versions of herself
mirrored in my eyes?
And what did I see in her?
She dazzled my conscious mind to life
As I rose from the oblivion of sleep,
sensing some what but knowing not what.
And so recursively she is
My own looming conscious eye
Flattering my world with false
Singularity
Because I know from my house of wood
That those thousand deliriously singing frogs
Down there in the lusty mud
Also carry two tiny versions of her in their eyes.
Birds of Two Feathers / by Lorraine Claggett
Let us return to the timber doodle
a bird who waddles and doesn’t fly
But jumps and honks peent, peent.
As is seen on New Hampshire’s blueberry fields
In spring.
It is a harbinger bird I’m told,
A bird I would like to see jumping, or harbingering.
The peent perhaps, could be optional?
Back at home on the Chesapeake’s shores
A dear bird with a name to rival the first,
The chickadee calls from the mulberry tree, hard to see
In the greening of spring.
Chickadee, chickadee dee fast and soft.
Chickadee, chickadee so busy and congenial,
This little one captures my heart.
And both equally hold talents of skill and perception.
The timber doodle cavorts and knows omens,
It has a magnificent bill.
The chickadee in outwitting large feeder gluttons
watches when to dart in for a seed, and escape immediately
To lunch in the tree, surpasses all others in tactical planning.
And sports a snappy black cap.
There’s one thing to know how the two birds do differ
To me in my house on the river.
When the sun and fresh air call me out from inside
Where the hallways are empty and rooms start to echo,
A cheerful whistling just above me
From some rustling leaves
Is the chickadee greeting me
Tells me I have a friend to go with me.
Refrain / by April Claggett
After a warm spring rain
When out walking again
You’re bound to discover
This resolute little feller:
The three-inch newt
In his natty orange suit.
Bent knees, toes splayed
Tail and belly in saucy sway
Beckoned by some ancient cue
He’s got an orgy to go to!
Which means, you should know
There’re hundreds in tow
by watch and by compass
Destined for the rumpus.
Each spring they reverse
And endlessly rehearse
The vernal ouroboros
And its magnetic force
With open ponds now beguiling
The naval orange iron filings.
So you, way up there
Make way, and take care
Step right or step left
For the red-spotted eft!
Westward / by Lorraine Claggett
Once I saw a poem entitled “Stepping Westward”
The title was enough.
I did not need to read more.
To hold the wonder of those two words alone
Has been enough for me who lived
Rooted these many years on an eastern shore.
The moving river is joy to watch,
And to feel the soft air coming from it
Is to be transported.
Hearing the notes of a Bach fugue, or
A distant guitar strummed in the night
Brings on other worlds.
The day I married
The days my children were born
And then left to claim their lives
Count as the milestones of my life.
A square of sun on the floor
Where a door lies opened
Beckons me there to stand in the light.
On Easter night an old friend died.
She has gone where there is light
And someday soon I will step westward too
At 10 / by April Claggett
The world outside is piled with snow
The barn became my refuge tho
My mother would not mind me here
Sheltering where animals go
My fuzzy pony stamps her hoof
Knickering in mild reproof
She does not want a ride today
She does not want to leave her roof
The barn a muffled dome does make
Soft wood buffering softer flake
I’ll stay and try to place the sound
In pleasing words, for mother’s sake
Two registers I think I hear
An icy whisper in the treble tier
While below a sigh of settling snow
Barely perceptible to my ear
My mother wonders if I might
Make my way into her sight
She checks the window toward the lane
The wind pulls up a veil of white
But something else my senses say
Is over where the chickens lay
A sweetly mewling calico kitten
In a small depression in the hay
I made my choice tho I don’t remember
I would not leave this life so tender
We played until the day turned dark
And wind turned wild that late December
The cracks where once the sunlight knifed
Now blow a hollow baleful fife
And heedless of my mother’s strife
In this cold world where chance is rife
I claim my life
I claim my life
Serena At Three / by Lorraine Claggett
My daughter’s daughter when she was three
Had a picture book story of a girl
Walking out in the night to find an owl
With her father. He held her hand
Was kind and liked to read the book to her.
She did not like the story,
It could have been because of the nighttime venture, but
The pages showing the owl she always skipped.
What did she know about the feathered creature
That made her close the book?
What did she, who was only cared for,
Know of huge wings slicing the night,
Eyes that swiveled as they burned the dark,
The taloned feet, the quick swoop,
And the small beating heart carried away?
She was told only of love, but at three ,
The meaning of the human spirit we bring complete at birth
Leaves us with but echoing remnants,
As our years of learning become forgetting.
Tall Meadow Requiem / by April Claggett
My father felt
He won the bet
Despite a plague of daughters
Despite dinners late
Things were broken
Mom never home
But left on the table
A clod of honeycomb
I feared his bees
They shimmied around him
Patrolled neck and arms
Crowned him
With regal calm
And tai-chi moves
Creature to creature
He inspected his brood
We dipped into it
A kingdom come
Pooled in a chipped plate
Of swallowed sun
How long the reach
How finely spun
How sweet the spoon
Tall meadow requiem
Moondark / by Lorraine Claggett
Tonight is the dark of the moon
The window glass is a blank black square,
the outside world gives no hint of the river
Or movement of a creature there
This hour is the very heart of darkness.
Wrapped in the stillness of place and sound
Thoughts and attention drop away
Waiting, stilled, giving in to unknowing
Absorbing darkness, losing quotidian day
I find I am part of the heart of the world
The Beech / by April Claggett
Among the champion sloughers
of the sluggish northern spring
whose slow psychotropic drip
Turns past to prelude again
The maples blush blood orange
The willows wear wasabi
The birches pull on long white gloves
Forsythias fling canary
Even the oaks of understatement
Sport burgundy striped britches
And pines add to their appliqué
Glowing lime green stitches
But the beech, she clutches her dead
Leaves in phantom photosynthesis
Semaphores to once and again
And spring’s very antithesis
For two more weeks as moribund
The tone-deaf beech will attest
To the end of time’s beginning
To the everpresent palimpsest
Smith Island / by Lorraine Claggett
On the island the people all know each other,
The fish and crabs and sunsets.
But mostly they know the waters of the Bay,
How they slip over the breakwaters,
Flood the roads
And pool under the homes,
Whispering
How much longer will you stay?
Taxes Due, Garden Started / April Claggett
Taxes due, garden started
preparations
Row by row
Tamping tedium
Seed soil contact
Not too deep
Digits digging
Owing what I kept
Owing and sowing
Spring has droughts
April has hers
Borrow more
Seed money
Pray the pump
Meets the must
Break the husk
Inflation
Slake and stake
Stake the claim
Raise a pyramid
Scheme of bean
Poles are bare
Market basket
Summary totals
Take stock
Index whys
Debts and doubts
Untitled / by Lorraine Claggett
Sometimes, weeding my garden,
Pulling out dandelions, hackberries, errant grasses.
Making neat borders,
I think of my little girls
Growing up barefoot, hair flying,
How I bobbed their bangs, gave them white gloves
And put them alike in dimity dresses.
Gray Matter / by April Claggett
The fog this morning
as dense and even
as to be awake
in a dreamless sleep
I rose early–or was it late
I ventured to discern
or did I, even remotely
did I even seem to search
for what I thought was there
The past is black and white like this
Black and white we say it is
as if we know we never did
This is not that
The present is graywater like this
sluicing into cranial cracks
is pulled rather
as jockeys on lemmings
This is not that
The future is something you can miss
especially if you’re late
or dead in fact
but death is the blue screen
of an exception error
This is not that.
I passed into my computer screen
search engine gray
Where flattened me
Puppet trolls my puppet foes
Puppet wows with emoji ohs
This is the matter with pixels
Are they matter
And am I only algorithm animated
As the bell curve tolls
Without a clapper
Still I doomscroll out the door
As if space is this or that
As if my gray morning jacket
is discernible in the fog.
Moving / by Lorraine Claggett
Her house was middle-aged with the floors gone bad
From fifty years of hard living what with the five children
And double that number of dogs.
The furniture must move out to leave floors totally bare
for the sanding machine.
She ran her hands over the sides of the chest,
Old walnut crafted when the forest covered the land
Made for the six generations who settled and stayed
Until the last sons moved away.
Her daughter, great granddaughters, any who follow
Will use it, tracing the patterns of the rich wood color,
Musing on the succession of hands that had filled its
Spaces with linens and clothing.
Next the desk, made three centuries ago, when the first people
Fished the Monongahela waters
And fitted their bows against the takers of the forest.
A grandfather, appointed postmaster, used the desk,
Another served as justice of the peace.
She opened the top, loved
The tiny drawers inside and a hidden compartment.
She pictured her grandchildren finding the hiding place.
The bookshelves, the closets all held treasures.
Caught in the web of memory,
Tenderly, she took down boxes, discovering marbles,
Matchbox collections, old coins, wooden puzzles.
Her grandmother’s love letters
Blackened with coal dust, wrapped in ribbon.
Small parcels of lived lives.
Then came upon a photo book of her own college years;
And spent an hour turning pages, seeing
Her roommate Annie, a boyfriend whose name she had forgotten,
Parties, rope swings, snow sculptures – never classrooms.
When her daughter came to help, they looked together.
Now, the chests and desk had moved out.
Room had been made on shelves
For useful things.
It was as if her life was somehow cleared.
It was her daughters’ time, not hers.
They were to learn of the forest, the first peoples,
Grandfathers and grandmothers and the things they had.
She had loved them all
And that is what she kept.
I check the bread a Sunday / by April Claggett
A heron heaves up over the bog
dragging legs and feet
like a special-effects bird
with heavy ironical beats
The bees drown in their feeder
and I leave the corpses for rafts
That’s beekeeper logic I guess
I check the bread
Daffodils face-plant all over the yard
tipped with snowsickness
abandoned to the April storm
two days ago, eight inches
Red-fingered peonies poke
like zombies up through the mud
amid pea-sized potholes
Where roofmelt made it bare
My mother calls from Maryland
She lost a thing, and defeat
feeds on the ends of her sentences
She has to call me back
I found a salamander corpse
while dusting for the last visit
my brother will probably pay me
unless he wants to when he’s 86
My studio-mate makes miniatures
Scale of one to one forty-four
Her granddaughter can have her dollhouse back
When she gets clean and sober
That cardinal attacks itself incessantly
between the Subaru and Chevy
finds himself a hall of mirrors
of endless rival enemies
My husband listens to the baseball feed
while operating a mouse
windows make diamonds of sunlight
stranded on the floor
I check the bread
Musing / by Lorraine Claggett
Walk the fields brown surfaced now,
wishing that they had seen a plow
to turn the dirt, let eyes follow where feet step
to find what treasures dirt might have kept,
alert to spot an edge of stone
partially from the earth escaped,
whose sharply pointed, scalloped shape
tells it was made for a bow
by the human hand that fashioned it
twelve hundred years ago.
Because you are the next to touch the stone
To hold in your hand what no one else had done
in all this time, muse on the man last holding it,
walking the summer land in need of prey,
in winters fishing oysters from the bay.
Think that your farm is fertile but your food is bought;
that in his day it also fed the deer he sought;
that you call the fields and shores your own;
but this early person, free to roam,
called the earth his people’s home.
Sorrow / by April Claggett
Some dark underlord
glided into her bay
and took a long swim.
Soft things shrank into their shells–
Flashing fish tightened their schools–
Feeders tucked in their feathery parts–
Any business of bubbling along
Shuttered.
The creature dragged its shadow–
A qualm and its reminder–
in slow possessive turns–
methodical cursive
inscribing all these days.
She considered herself clever enough–
To see all days as partly cloudy–
To manage her little boat on fickle waves–
To have found a quiet shore
To sink her heels into
But the osprey saw it coming
A long way away–
Logically making its way
To this new home.
Mist / by Lorraine Claggett
A part of a day in mist is a rare and mystical moment.
A spell is created by the wall of grey in its inexorable march up the river,
Which, like a theater curtain, closes each scene behind it as it comes.
Stands of trees, the sandy shore the trees outline and finally,
The river itself, all disappear into grey blankness.
This is the covered time.
There is no measured time, no reasoned thinking.
When thoughts give up they leave the mind to dreams.
Other worlds take form; other creatures live.
In this imaginary place fears and sorrows abate.
There are no shadows in the mist.
Villain-elle / by April Claggett
No matter what and no matter why
When beech buds open without fail
Comes the curse of the dread black fly
Never mind Aphrodite’s lucid sky
Persephone shakes off her cindered veil
Letting little bloodsucking demons fly
We chase black floaters on our eyes
Our skin is riddled in bugbite Braille
We wear red-welt chokers and ties
We always say “live free or die”
But now we live in a chosen jail
Wondering where we went awry
You ridicule the New Hampshire “Hi”
Our arms flying in full flail
Around our head: Shoo fly! Bye-bye!
The torment will intensify
And as long as they prevail
We let the expletives fly high
To Hades with that damn black fly!
free / by Lorraine Claggett
a farmer with a hoe in his garden
my dog flopped sunning on a patch of garden dirt
two guineas up a tree still outfoxing the fox
a thief in a dumpster outrunning the cops
the mainsail swings wide to go before the wind
giggling girls swing their hair walking down the street
grasses in the river are growing drowned again
I float drifting, dark water slipping around my skin
remembering, the weeping man cannot stop his wracking sobs
as long as music sounds, feet old and young are moving.
Helen Frankenthaler / by April Claggett
I want to be like her
–minus the cigarette–
and let the paint
slip and stain and pour
over the canvas rolled out on the floor
of a factory garret–
bleeding bloomscapes in
color euthanasia,
mountains and seas of
pulsing synesthesia,
self-imposed amnesias
of other people’s needs
or so it seems–
to really have something to show
for a woman’s hours alone
as good as anything ever done
in a category of her own–
and desperate–
to have slept with that critic
why she really did it
we can readily admit it
to her work she was wedded
and men bestowed the credit
as if she must do this
was meant for this
no one could disregard
disparage dismiss
the force that had called her
Helen Frankenthaler.
And then I would be
just what my friends wish
to see me be–
flinging paint around
in a space of my own
as if I were free
and feverish
as if I must do this
was meant for this
as if!
But not this–
this paint diseased
with the need to please–
brush well-behaved
colors well-laid and such–
cowardly, okay, yet
never enough to be desperate.
Just the best of intentions
content with honorable mentions
this polite presentation of lemons
on folded French linen
to go with a woman’s kitchen
where while she slices
and dices and thinks how nice
it is a woman out there
has something to show
for her hours alone–
I want to be like her.
Meetinghouse / by Lorraine Claggett
The rectangles that march along the room,
Hold smaller squares of glass inside
And with three doors, all together
Give the rectangular house its light.
From sturdy trees within a grove
Men joined the frame to fit tight,
Making joist meet beam in firm right angles,
They built their house to hold the light.
Under windows spilling light
Today the folks still gather
In silence waiting that they might
Know of a way to live upright.
Cento / by April Claggett
On the island the people all know each other
how to feather a nest or make a peace
Now the time has come
telling me something in its cracking
sucking lifefuel from foxgloves
like redemption
From a reconnoitered station
wearing the same age forever
you carried the stone of it
I have never been so surrounded
–one line from each poet in alphabetical order on Day 15
A Poet? / by Lorraine Claggett
I am not a poet.
Writing lines on immature musings,
Trying to fit them into respectable cadences
Can’t be poetry.
Only yesterday I discovered that words with identical meanings
Are not suitably interchanged within a poem
But the ups and downs of the syllable stress determines selection.
It has taken these twenty- seven days to learn that this is a craft
Which truly demands a skill.
And yet, and yet,
When a friend on the street stopped me, saying they did not know I am a poet
(having been told that Tupelo Press put my poems online).
I replied ‘shucks, we are all poets’.
Why did I blurt that out?
Thinking later, is it because we all have questions about the truth of things
Faintly felt, ineffable, but innate to us?
Any person may find answers in a poem,
That says what cannot be spoken
But may be known.
A Month / by Lorraine Claggett
April, did you really want to come in that veil of white, covering the earth like young girls do going to communion,
frosty in their shyness?
And then, as quickly, unveiling your true self
to be the harbinger of buds on trees,
green swords pushing up through earth, and colors
daffodil yellow, iris blue, and red of tulips.
April, you truly loved the rain, coming every day until the last one.
The earth was refreshed and surcharged to get started to
grow things, colorful or not.
Teeny black seeds went to bed in soil to wake up as leafy lettuce
and other salads – amazing, magical work well done.
Those days had sunny parts and good breezes, so that an undercurrent of excitement attached to all things
– little boys hoping for a game outdoors, dogs
sticking at their sides in anticipation,
even with the boat tied at the pier,
rocked by the windy water, mast bouncing.
So April, you are leaving now,
leaving the peony buds to bloom in May,
your soft rain to sojourn in clouds,
your changeable, nurturing, flower-filled days to keep in store
for another cycle of the sun.
Why did I blurt that out?
Thinking later, is it because we all have questions about the truth of things
Faintly felt, ineffable, but innate to us?
Any person may find answers in a poem,
That says what cannot be spoken
But may be known.