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Nancy Burke
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Summer Frost
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A sudden frost rides in on the cusp of fall
and dusts the sleeping pumpkins.
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We’re filling sacs with green tomatoes,
snipping stems with metal shears
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that hurt our hands. We lay the babies
in a basket with a blanket under them,
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since the smallest bruises in the young
will surely bloom and ruin them in time.
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We spread a hundred orbs on windowsills
to ripen and cut the stalks of a dozen
blue delphinium to fill a vase,
imagining we'd saved them from a fate
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worse​ than the blade, trying to forget
how often rescue is a kind of murder.
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The City
We’re building our foundation out of bones,
laying the lattices one atop the other,
delicate needlework, crocheted doilies lifted
from end-tables and placed, one over the other,
in strata bleached of face and voice. We’re accruing
this filagree, of which you’re now a part,
this reef for worms to swim through,
whose crevasses shelter the pursued
from their pursuers, while above,
our small boat floats in darkness.
In my dream, I walked your city of white girders,
in which death is no longer, porous landscape
into which our private scaffolds will be knit,
country of no stories, and wanted to tell you
I’d witnessed it through your eyes,
walked its ivory floors, paced its
luminous fusions, stronger even than solidity,
but your sockets hold only emptiness. You
don’t see, and my dream was a canoe
drifting with the current, down and down.
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Autumn
It’s nine o’clock and
church bells are chiming,
reminding us to mourn.
Ten o’clock and someone
blows a shofar, reminds us
that mourning is the
path to a new year.
In the schoolyard, children
are teaching each other
how not to mourn, how
elastic time can be,
the way an instant can
soak up the day like a sponge.
Their parents say nothing,
squander their authority,
preferring to forget.
At evening, we the faithful
kneel on our rugs and
face the qibla, aligning
ourselves with the dead.
Do you understand what a
tiny diaspora the living are,
wandering among the spirits?
It’s a miracle they ever find
their kind. In the front hall,
the clock insists it’s midnight,
calls to all the unmourned
victims of our warlike souls.
The grey half-light delivers us:
Praise to the day, in which
the sun will sing the same
new song! Praise the leaves
that flutter from the maple,
strewn beauty and the bare
limbs outstretched upward,
reminding us to mourn.
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Nancy Burke is a poet, fiction writer, psychoanalyst and psychotherapy activist from Evanston IL (which does have its own coast!). Her work has appeared in Story International, After Hours, American Poetry Journal, Confrontation, Whitefish Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other literary publications, and has won numerous prizes. Her well-reviewed novel, Undergrowth, was published by Gibson House Press.