Barbara E. Hunt Poetry

On the Island
(After John M. Synge: general knowledge of time depends…on the direction of
the wind)

 

Does it not mire us in muggy mess?
Send squelching rains? Or sweep crisp
clearing skies blue? With bluster blow?
Much more.

We are taught deprivation
as waves are sucked away out to the Bay
so stranded our spirits stalk life
like flats of algae and shoal.

Or swamping
us higher-higher as creeping as dread can drown
bravery with ever-inching persistence. Yet
more than bejeweled whitecaps can,

velocity would cause hairs to raise up
on our necks. Send chills. Then languid,
lazy-lapping drag the hours, minutes
through dog-days while haze

blankets our shores. Just as the trees
by decades’ krumholz-stooped, so
our psyches have been imprinted
by shift and shelter. Attuned to what’s

unseen as air, that lays down
a rhythm for existence
as primitive
as rock.

 

Slips

Sometimes I fear the place we live
is only an idea or some figment
cobwebbed in a dream. There but not.

So I let my fingers trace the oldest
scar, nubby on my forehead
to ground myself in Mama’s retelling.

How I flew from the porch stoop,
bird-child she misunderstood like an itch.
Never the same, like Berlin

with a wall; then without. And now place
is more memory. It slips tinged like Southern
Comfort on the tongue. Or bleeds

like captive sunshine from Great Lake rock
into barefeet. Comes like Diamond’s
Hot August Night, stylus poised

over spinning vinyl. Or how the loon’s
cry before dawn carries like heartache.
And still I feel the pinch of thighs

stuck to the baby-blue Chrysler’s
baking backseat. No draft from either cracked
window. I’m airless and musing if place

is not a tacky thing. Like too much layered
floor-wax on stained linoleum I was tasked
to dissolve with turpentine, steel wool

and muscle. Like dreaded Mondays pinned
to the calendar. And so I crave the crunch
of snow-bermed slopes; a sled-rope

frozen in my mittened hand. Real
as stumped legs that swish, And forgiveness.
All I can do is envy those with landlines,

welcome mats and shrubbery
that demands trimming every
autumn despite leaf loss.

 

August Elegy

Then sunrise, stifled by night-mists.
And loons’ call and response

ricocheting in mourning song: nature
is forever and yet nothing lasts.

Young trees grow to obscure views
that decrepit ones once ruled.

Even granite and quartz shores
are sheared by ice; pulverized

to pebble by frost’s push and pull.
How ancient this glacial basin.

How fragile. As loon’s wistful
warble.