Letter to Gail

You write, "Where has the fall fallen?"
and how time is escaping, leaking like a hiss
from a blue balloon.  Outside, the sky
is that lapidary azure of mid-October.
You rush from meeting to board room,
while each day the leaves shift
in color and tone, red-orange, green-gold.
When you turn, they've already fallen.
You write that you would like to stop working,
but phone messages and faxes pile up on the floor.
This air, so cold and clean you could bite it,
like an apple.  All of our stories have the same ending.
Still, we drone on, little bees, drive while listening
to voice mail, drinking take-out coffee, trying to do
too many jobs in too few hours.  You say you'd like to wake
up in the light, go for long walks with the dog, not answer
the phone for months.  Outside the window, the unreachable
sky, the burning blue fire.

 

Some Enormous Sky

The sky is so large
You are forced to look close.
                                    —Judith Kitchen

 
Leaving Provincetown by boat, going round the hook
at Race Point, past Land's End, the lighthouse,
and out, onto the flat calm waters of the Stellwagon Bank,
where, there might be whales.   Years ago, off
the Jersey coast, we baked on a deck for eight hours,
seeing nothing, no whales, no fish, not even birds,
just the smooth painted ocean, the dull blue sky.
But here, there are whales:  humpbacks, finbacks, minkes.
It is so quiet I can hear their exhalations,
the hot salt breath from their blow
holes, feel spume on my bare arms.
But it is the sky, with its pods of clouds,
the enormous sky, stretching over us
in our little candy boat, that leaves me
open-mouthed, gasping for air.

 

 

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Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including
The Christian Science Monitor, Nimrod, River City, Yankee, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cream City Review, Poetry International, The Denver Quarterly, America, Zone 3,  Passages North, Negative Capability, Karamu, The Madison Review,  Highlights for Children, Caprice, Appalachia, The Atlanta Review,  Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

Anthologies: Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press),  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem, Wendy Bishop, ed., (Addison, Wesley, Longman), Worlds in OurWords: Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall), Reading and Writing from Literature (Houghton Mifflin), For A Living: The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press), A Whole Other Ball Game: Women's Literature on Women's Sport (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Grow Old Along With Me (Papier-Mache Press),  For She Is The Tree of Life: Women Writers on their Grandmothers (Conari Press), Journey Into Motherhood (Putnam),  This Sporting Life (Milkweed Press), Life On the Line (Negative Capability Press), others.