Two Poems by Dianne Williams Stepp

Sojourn

White, no serpent-green leaves
taking on song, no roses
pruned to their best canes, no imagined
buds, clipped patches of lawn.  Florid
with autumnal blaze, let the creeper
snake across the neighbor's fence
at home.  I don't miss it.  Look here,
my feet snug in woolens, the quilt,
the bed, the stove.  Outside
a single wand of smoke lofts the lodge
below.  All right!  It was the petunias,
I confess.  Seedy dames
sagging from boxes.  And the fuchsias'
pursed lips!  Not enough nectar left for moths.
Here the pines are shrouded white, the lake
a silver tongue of ice.  Against barren cliffs, the yews
are blackened twigs.  Oh, let it go!


Meditation

No change under that flat stone,
still the delicate roots
veining the bared palm,
still the potato bugs, little
armadillos rolled into terrified balls.
No change in the shadows
leafing across that lawn, or the summer
grass, brown-tipped with loneliness.
The breeze chatters through the weeds
leaving behind whole afternoons
tipped on their sides like empty flower pots.
So what if the freeway roars like the sea.
So what if the white house stranded
behind an island of concrete
peels paint, and its fretted hedge of lilacs
guards a car lot.  Look,
here comes an old woman on two sticks
poking in the brambles
for berries, and there, that old apple
is flush with its scaly green knobs.

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DIANNE WILLIAMS STEPP is a recent graduate for the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.  Her poetry has appeared in Willow Springs, Fireweed, The Bellowing Ark and the Hawaii-Pacific Review.  She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. 

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