Selected Poems

The Hidden

Trees meditate remarkable acts — ascending to heaven,
walking toward us to say we’re forgiven.
Instead, they learn slowly, as we do,
the magnificent strength of watching, staying,
to reach downward, upward until the distance
from root to uppermost leaf is the perfect air
to let water flow up from earth to sky.

Women of our tribe know how to keep secrets,
so deep at times they die of their power.
Every face can hide so much, sweetly feigning
enough to get by. Love begins anyway,
with the force of green shoots.
In the moon, a new song
no one hears but the crows.

Joy travels softly,
a creek in the woods no one visits
until the day it rises
in your hands. Linked hands hold us up,
though we don’t think of it,
community, help, the way everyone knew
who’s sick, for miles.

Hands of the old ones reach out, great-grandmothers
we scarcely saw, distant on farms
in dim-lighted rooms, storm-cellars,
porches with yellow light bulbs,
listening for the small lives
we are in the distance. This water
runs through everything I know.

Eskimo Woman

I want to lie down all winter. Silence takes me
to the day I was born,
and the days before that.

Darkness and cold have lived in this place
so long none of my people remember
a time before them.

The light bulb is a small invention.
Think of our fathers making fire,
to keep us alive. Or the sun!

People were not meant to crumble
like potato chips, to flutter like plastic bags
gasping at air in city streets.

I draw quietness to my lap,
or build a fire, a small life
like mine in great winter.


The fire’s flickering
helps my thoughts to mend.
I know this darkness.

In the long night, under blankets,
my body stops crying. I watch,
the true world comes near.

I wait for the days of light,
through the healing
of weeks, months.

The false world circles like wolves.
When I was a child, we survived in cold
by holding each other.

No need for talk.
My father roused me for hunting
by touching my shoulder.


Wake as a listener. Go out.
Listen with your body.
See how deep listening can go.

Hear the greatest speech.
Watch snow, stars.
Know which truth to keep.

Over land and water
without a track
the silence travels.

Under wings of snow
voices of birds
gather power.

Listen to winter’s stone,
the winds of darkness.
Remember the sun.

Grapevine (at Murphy crossroads)

May the FINA station’s smug steel and cement,
its Quik store blocking our view of the landmark
Baptist Church, the iron bell,
milk-blue stained glass
waiting for sun,
fall. Let the day come
when its rubble is covered with flowers,
glints of mica in dreaming grass.
We’ll know it’s there
but think about it less than the dirt.

May the white frame grocery
on the crossroad’s opposite corner
rise in spring sun forever,
and the grapevine on its east wall
carry the river of what we might become
up. Asleep in our ignorance, walking,
we live while its veins reach
the roots of grape-arbors
near our grandmothers’ porches,
their drowse, the grapes’ holy dust.

May its branches,
tough wood gray as ghosts,
hold until the wall itself
is gone. All of the walls we remember.
Planted grapes, mark of our coming,
work of our hands, endurance
in this hard country. Wild grapes, too,
muscadine, deep in the woods,
mark of the richness of the land
before we came. May they outlast us.