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Nancy Burke

​​

Summer Frost

A sudden frost rides in on the cusp of fall

and dusts the sleeping pumpkins.

​​

We’re filling sacs with green tomatoes,

snipping stems with metal shears

that hurt our hands. We lay the babies

in a basket with a blanket under them,

since the smallest bruises in the young

will surely bloom and ruin them in time.

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

worse​ than the blade, trying to forget 

how often rescue is a kind of murder. 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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