Tag: Homebound Publications

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34 km from Paris

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my husband Eric D. Lehman‘s novella Shadows of Paris, I’m posting this poem, not of Paris exactly, but when you read Shadows, you’ll know why this poem makes sense. The characters in his beautifully crafted story also “know something of transformation,” but that’s all I’ll say. You should discover it for yourself. Make your pilgrimage to Homebound Publications and buy your copy. Click again to get  Lune de Miel, where this poem first appeared.

Pilgrim at Auvers
The pigeons at L’eglise Notre Dame know something
of transformation. White broods in a sky that has forgotten
color and the silhouette of clouds. A quiet stroll
through narrow, charcoal streets led me here,
up ancient stone steps to the church where Vincent
van Gogh saw blue-black sky churn in flight around
the toasted edifice. The flock perches until the hint
of something migratory and innate calls them to stir;
in hues of gray they erupt in a smooth arc, returning
to roost on the slants of the high, tilted steeple.
Winter weighs endurance and transition as stone erodes
to dust, leaves compost to mud, and summer flowers
that steadily surveyed August afternoons convert
to dried stalks in frozen dirt. Pilgrims, too, know of shifts
and I walk into the warm and lonely church to wait
for language to come again to my cold lips.
Fifteen hundred hours toll from the bell tower,
a grave listens at the top of the hill, and a downcast sun
aches to paint maize onto the bare winter scroll.

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“It would be easier . . . “

Here’s a poem that appeared in Reconnaissance, published by Homebound Publications in 2015.

Long Shot

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.      ~Eudora Welty

The dilemma is not
about choosing between
architecture or faces,
panorama or close-up,
indirect light or flash

but between
the print’s future frame
and the quiet immobility
of reflection—of just sitting
and being, not worrying
about whether any of this
will be preserved digitally
and remembered in twelve
or thirteen years. Chances are,

tomorrow I will struggle
with recreating the bird
swaggering near my feet. Maybe
in some somnambulant day dream,
I’ll re-see these tiny
daisy-like weeds and hear
the passersby crunch gravel
under lazy sneakers. I might
be able to gather pieces
of foil and flattened cigarettes
from a mind cluttered
with fading poppies
and the leaves of a tree
I cannot name
blowing in a breeze.

It would be easier
if I didn’t love
every single pigeon, this one
with his spooky eyes and orange beak—
a single brushstroke
of white and teal beneath his neck,DSC_0294

and if the fence’s shadow
wasn’t so dappled and transient,
if acorns would stop falling
mid-distance between dawn
and dusk, long enough
to preserve their posts
in my mind. If forgoing
the shot and closing my eyes
would be enough to argue against

some future self
who will be too old or sad
or something worse
to remember this.

Check out these other great titles from Homebound Publications including new fiction by L.M. Browning  and Eric D. Lehman, poetry by Andrew Jarvis and James Scott Smith, illustrated children’s literature by Elizabeth Slayton, and nonfiction by David K. Leff.  Add Four Blue Eggs and Wildness: Voices of the Sacred Landscape to your book bag and you’ll be set (for a while)! Support independent publishers and writers who want to make a difference in the world. Save 20% and receive free shipping on orders over $35.00 with coupon code: SUMMERREADING20.

 

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There are, of course, flowers

Reconnaissance yields a bouquet of Quebecois forest flowers for a hot summer day. Un-vase the garden.

Photos from Parc National D’Oka, and Montreal Botanical Gardens

Poem from Reconnaissance, Homebound Publications, 2015

Mrs. Dalloway

There are, of course, flowers;
they fill her hands before any vase,
but even in their glass tomb, she sees
the void they have lent their lives to.
Once the guests arrive, she sinks
between the desire for the most
satisfying success and the deep
and heeding certainty that none of it
prevents the day’s observable artifacts
from passing through the clear,
choking air of an open window.

 

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The Beauty of Faces

Babci’s recipe, mom’s hands, Amy’s poems.

Josephine Nawocki
Mothers in Law
1951
South Colony

 

Babka

I eat the bread with raisins and some butter
remembering how I first learned to knead it.
My mother’s hands would shape the bread

in careful mounds, the counter floured
in a dusting, light as graying memory.
I mix the dough with raisins and some sugar

moving the moist glob with my hands.
She’d warn me not to knead too gently,
her hands would show me how the bread

should give and tug, like elastic,
then surrender; let the yeast begin
to tease the bread with flavor and some nurture.

Standing in the kitchen, the light streams in;
the heat takes over with deft precision,
my mother’s hands would ease the bread

into awaited sleep. She tells me now
to let it sit, give it time, watch it rise.
I eat the bread with raisins and some butter.
I long to see her hands rising in my own.

~published in Potato Eaters, Finishing Line Press, 2008

 

The Beauty of Faces

We hold tightfisted to the beauty of faces
because photographs have no sound
unless we tap into the orchestra behind them,
try to hear the family’s voices piped
and whistling the day they were recorded
as we can only imagine how glaciers
moving in and out of the landscape
create sound spacious enough to crack
the horizon. So, too, the hiss and spit
of the northern lights must be dreamed
because our ears are inefficient
as old telegraph wires.

So the house
on South Colony Street carries
children’s laughter up the front stairway
sloping toward the kitchen
where Josephine’s peeled oranges hum
like music from the Victorola
filling the heart with remembrance and history,
pulling toward a place called home.

~published in Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2014

 

 

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Wildness: Voices in the Sacred Landscape

Check out this great new anthology. In celebration of the 5th anniversary of its founding, Homebound Publications is pleased to announce the publication of Wildness: Voices of the Sacred Landscape, featuring 19 authors including David K. Leff, L.M. Browning, Gunilla Norris, Theodore Richards, Gary Whited, Eric D. Lehman, and me.

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Here’s a teaser from my essay “Choosing Peregrine.”

This peregrine is not too much bigger than a crow or mourning dove, but unmistakable, once I finally find her in my assisted gaze. We piece together the story.

Support Homebound, an independent, socially and environmentally conscious publisher. Purchase your copy today. Celebrate beauty; choose love. Be kind.

erics wildness quote

 

 

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The True Weight

West Highland Way, August 2011; a little tough, a little glorious

 

eric in pain

The True Weight

We make a list of all our favorite moments—
best hikes, finest meals— skipping
over the hard parts—when boots filled
with muck and rain froze our hands
and spun through the plastic
of our water-proof coats, each cursed step
you suffered through pain without ever
surrendering to sighs. Cataloging
the singular bluebell doesn’t really

tell the whole story. The tiny tear-shaped
flower pressed between “A Dream” and
“Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald”
in the pages of Robert Burns
does not relate the true heft of that volume—
the pages, browned and frayed, turn easily
one at a time but bound together
they hold the true weight of the poet’s words.

So too, yellow broom and wood sorrel
decorating the ascent through Glen Nevis
or the heather spilling lavender toward
the modest peak of Bien Inverveigh
can never be summarized
in one sprig of tiny rainbow blooms.

From Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2014

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Rusting

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From Four Blue Eggs

Please add Homebound Publications to your list of stops for holiday shopping. Winter Sale–25% off! Finish 2015 off with a book in your lap.

How to Say Goodbye

The eighth month buzzes
through lichen days, dry
and hot; mud pools sweat
from the long-ago decadence
of rain and frogs plop like ice cubes
into this imagined summer drink.

Badges of mica shimmer
in the sun-bathing rocks
and the thirsty earth sends
missionaries—brown mosses
crunching underfoot; leaves
absorbing the prism, reflecting
the short, electromagnetic
waves we have come to call
green, and grasses turning
now, slightly away as if
to say, enough, spreading
chlorophyll cylinders
to catch a dreamed of
rain drop. Even crickets
sing with parched voices;
their constancy interrupted
by an intermittent hiccup;
small bow legs pause to rest
and then return to syncopation.

It’s too hot for human flesh:
our scales have fallen off,
and our naked, unprotected cells
do not photosynthesize.
We are much like sticks
fallen from hardy oaks,
vulnerable to the breakage
of heat. But there are promises, too
here in this parched world:
of shelter, protection, the sip
of a cool night, the awe of witnessing
something of change; promises
of relief if only we hang on until
our reddest moment, after we’ve turned
everything to sugar and can let go
knowing winter’s white can hold us.

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Happy Birthday

This poem was originally published in Four Blue Eggs, which is available from Homebound Publications (ON SALE) as well as on Amazon (paperback or e-book ON SALE!). Please consider purchasing a copy or downloading it for your Kindle or Nook and enjoying the poems on a summer day. In these transitional weeks between mother’s day and father’s day, you can read poems that honor family, nature, renewal and stamina. Enjoy. Buy a copy for your mom. This poem is for my mother, who’s birthday is today, June 1st. She’d be 72.

On My Mother’s Sixty-sixth Birthday

The hike is pleasant; the trail markers
are new, ferns and mountain laurel bloom
along the path. A soft whispering breeze
says something about remembrances
and a flimsy gasp escapes from my lungs.
Wishing for its own voice, a trickle of water
inches down a slope of jagged rocks as if
wanting just to touch something, however cool.
In a clearing, I see across the rounded tops of trees
into the valley and into the complex
gathering of green—the heart of June,
new and curious. Yet everything seems
to be empty. Despite the emeralds
all I spy are gaps; rifts appear where leaves
and bark separate, the gulf between earth
and sky is full of ever-present grey stones.
More than a half-life has passed
since we wondered whether the hair
she was losing would grow back black
or peppered with white ash, but I cannot
remember what we decided. Memory
in its detachment is as insufficient
as a summer waterfall.

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National Poetry Month

Head over to Homebound Publications for all you need for National Poetry Month, and get ready for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Here’s a selection from Reconnaissance and my little son, Django, who inspired the poem:IMG_4082

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Look for Reconnaissance in paperback and ebook, on Amazon, Kindle, and Nook or ask for it in your local indie bookstore.

Justifying the Ways of Animals to God

Having little or no knowledge
about the fall of man,
the boy approaches the ringneck
with the zeal of a crusader
without pausing, as there is
nothing eternal to consider.

The confession had been shed already:
flaky, transparent skin hidden
beneath a rug in the unheated summer room—
the yellow necklace collaring
a brand-new black form.

The saga unfolds quietly
unaided by the dramatic pauses
of scripture nor capped off
with sermons on forgiveness.
The bite is swift, but not final:
there must be suffering.

Rebellion, pride, seduction—
these do not enter the minds of snakes
and a cat cannot tell a fallen angel
from a demon dancing
in the living room’s haloed light.