Category Archives: Poems

Waiting Through

The glass door is decorated with nose-smudges,
tongue-presses, and who-knows-what kinds of fingerprints
while the Christmas window-clings lie sparkling on the floor.

Advent has popped upon the top of me,
quick on the heels of a slow-in-coming Autumn,
a Thanksgiving whose late appearance leaves me rattling.

Our hand-made turkeys still hang on the wall,
probable witnesses to the Epiphany this year:
oxen, sheep, turkey.

Even on these cloudiest and darkest December days
the mess sparkles: strewn toy villages, soggy napkins,
crumpled tissues, packed bedrooms, loose bath towels, squabbling voices.

In the attic, the wreath and four candles wait for me to find them.

Forgiveness Hides in the Housework

I run boiling hot water over the floors steaming away dirt, germs, and spilled tomato sauce.  They shine.  In the morning, strawberry yogurt splatters and speckles the dark wood dotting our landscape with accident and mistake, and by afternoon, thousands of bread crumbs confetti the counters, tables, chairs, the bottoms of our bare feet.

Now it is evening.  The joys begin to settle in the house, loosed leaves on a windless day, and I find my soul glistening in the mercies that come falling with sleep.

Clearing

Autumn creeps toward us this year.  The white birch
turns from  green to yellow and goldens into November.
I watch the bright leaves shout to me through the front window,
and everyday for two weeks I think how I will write about it.

Now the wind comes, and well over half of the leaves
cover the ground in a splendid circular swath of color.
The wind has taken the rest:  oak, maple, buckeye, plum.
I see straight through all the branches into the sky.