poems – Page 3 – Amy Nawrocki

August 16, 2016August 16, 2016

Black Sheep Reflections

Five years ago about this time, Eric and I were on our way back from Scotland. We didn’t take in the entire West Highland Way on foot as planned, but our black sheep guides (all of them) deserve a whiskey toast.

To Leave Is One Thing

By the time we get back to Glasgow
the thistle has turned cottony
and the black sheep who has been our guide
rests quietly, dinned wheels and muddied
exterior, in the parking lot of Arnold Clark’s car hire.

On the Erskine Bridge, traffic stops
for a suicide, but we are not sad, not really.
To leave is one thing, to depart
without experience sewn into muscle and mind
would be too much.

The cabbie’s loud music turns into an opportunity.
As we approach the airport
we fill our minds of all that came before:

Central Station from the hotel window,
the Highlands materializing through the rain.
Stirling Castle and the cobbled way
toward Aberfeldy. Maple scarf marriage
and the Fortingall Yew. Haggis and scones,
bens, bogs, and roundabouts. Humming
Loch Lomond, and stealing Skye
from Clan Donald. Putting our feet down,
imagining there is no pain.

For nights to come we will dream of thistles.

August 2, 2016August 2, 2016

Book Club

Here is an invitation to the books you are about to order: “Book Club” appears in Four Blue Eggs, which is now conveniently available directly from me. Find the “Buy Now” on the “Purchase Signed Copies” menu tab. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of tea, and make your purchase (through PayPal) today. I’ll be happy to personalize messages and get your copy to your mailbox asap.

Book Club

In the months before my father died
he joined a half-dozen mail-order book clubs.
The hard backs with their sturdy resolve
arrived week after week
as his own pages dissolved in vinegar.
After, the packages clogged the front step,
waiting for idle new eyeglasses, waiting
for a heart, bruised and bypassed,
to decipher conquests and romances,
to find that it was not unlike others—
full of the blood that would betray it.

I pull up to the long driveway
and find, rubber-banded to the post,
this month’s arrival—The Oxford
Companion to World Mythology.
Instead of scribbling cancel
on the invoice, I crack the spine
in order to breathe in the crisp pages,
to decipher the stories that will have to fill
the spaces where my own heart failed.

As always, you can also buy unsigned copies and e-books through Homebound Publications. Add a couple other titles to your cart while you’re at it.

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July 20, 2016

A Gathering of Sorts

A Gathering of Sorts

As morning curdles its way to noontime,
autumn plays its lazy guitar.
To join the living world,
we make our way to the post office
with enough change in hand for three stamps.
Their duty is delivering messages:
a utility bill, the insurance payment, a letter
to a friend. In the front of the line,
a woman’s daughter spins
and spins in her orbit.
Gathering packages in his arms,
a man, Santa-like in tweed jacket
and leather cap, stands beside
a painter covered in plaster.
He sways and looks away
from us, staring instead into
the clouds of his day.

Each day we perform ordinary acts:
we teach algebra, refinance mortgages,
cook dinner, journey to the moon.

Each day a mixture of light and color
penetrates our trust. We place our faith
in little things: the oak’s red summit,
a stamped envelope,
holding the door for each other
as we enter and leave each other’s lives.

Click the title to find Potato Eaters, where this poem first appeared.

July 17, 2016July 17, 2016

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.

July 9, 2016July 9, 2016

Threads

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This unfinished cross-stitch tapestry was started (I think) by my mom in 1977. That’s the date stamped on the pattern. I rescued the unfinished project from the old house in one of the many clean-out sessions, found in a walk-in closet along with many other sewing materials, loose fabric swatches, patterns and pincushions, scissors and embroidery floss. It’s been in my closet ever since. The center was finished (a sampler with alphabet and numbers) and about a fourth of the border had already been stitched. The shadow of her original embroidery hoop makes a distinct age mark; it’s gone now, but the needle was left in this position. My suspicion is that she never finished it because in 1978 she gave birth to her fifth child–Erick. She also began to do more quilting and stenciling by then, so her art projects shifted. I hope to finally finish it in time for the birth of her second grandchild, Erick and Shelby’s baby due in September.

Threads

Opening the walk-in closet filled
with the stuff of living—I think
one day we will have to sell the house.
In the meantime, closing the door
as a hatbox falls, there are no poems
about choosing the appropriate dress
for your mother to be cremated in.

As a schoolchild, I learned
when there is anything left over
you must carry it. I’m taught to love
what lingers—the timpani in a slow concerto,
the echo of a lost voice,
the sound, three rooms away
of a breath stopping on its last chord.
Paying its debt, nighttime
closes its eyes and gives itself up
to morning. I think she is sleeping,
so best let her sleep. Keep the cat
from waking her.

I recognize my mother’s hands
on the walls of our house. These are her threads;
the threads I hold onto as I make my way,
always there is a path back.

My first act as an orphan: I choose
the sapphire dress, the best color I know
depicting the moon’s shadow
as it spirals away from the earth.

June 30, 2016

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

June 15, 2016June 15, 2016

Second Thoughts

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Second Thoughts

Birches with peeling bark
root with certainty in the spring soil
while the ifs
of the inorganic world outshine
the quiet, sun-soaked solitude.
Stretching on a lazy rock,
I manufacture thoughts and watch them
roam like hawks, settling
now and then on rabbits, mice,
the occasional thesis.

A balmy spring wind flaps
the empty pages of an untold tale
like parade flags waving at bystanders.
If I stay long enough
the paper will yellow and parch,
and if the wind stops, my eyes
will ambush the conclusion.

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June 5, 2016June 5, 2016

Slow Steps, Hard Work

What to say of tomorrow’s

slow steps? The peaks that rise
from Glencoe carry weathered echoes
and gorges sliver slowly without
sympathy. The only way

to plea away erosion
is to chart the heart’s geology
and listen to the bagpiper’s
ageless song. The only way
to get up the mountain
is hand in hand.

for Eric

June 1, 2016

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From Four Blue Eggs, published by Homebound Publications. Celebrate 5 years independent publishing, order your copy today, and give it to your mom.

On My Mother’s Seventy-third 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.