USA

                               Photo by Richard Margolis

Standing By

My religious (and sinewy) friend
wants to prune her life.
It's heavy weight no longer works;
she wants a higher yield.
An urge, something lit from within,
fists up in her heart
making both a durable root and
a tug of war.
She sits at the mercy
of her circumscribed world,
lost in the syntax of its own ancient language.
I want to be one of the other voices
lingering on her particular soil,
drifting around the edges,
telling her about the beautiful
bark of the red oak.
I want to listen as she takes
an account of loneliness and
spins away from homegrown voices.
But little room exists in her liturgy,
and who am I to suggest otherwise?
Who am I to say she won't
slip on the pruned slopes?

A Writing Friendship

At best we have twenty years left,
maybe twenty-five
for the bravado of journals and magazines,
a few books under our belts.
You and me across the room
talking to new writers
about where to begin.
When you mention what makes
a good essay, I remember
the first one of yours
I read--the one I told you
held too much tension
and had no place to go.
Twenty years is nothing anymore.
It'll roll around so fast
and right up to the end
we'll be talking about
words perched on the edge of our minds.
A thought will start up and meander its way through
and before you know it
an essay will release itself
from our heart's labor.
Some cold December day we'll be on the phone again
trying to decided how to pare down the page or,
like James Wright once said, how it is somedays
all we can do is speak in a flat voice.
Listen, I know we're in the middle of our lives and
maybe we started too late,
(and maybe memory will catch us off balance)
but twenty years is twenty years.
It could be everything.

published in a Bennington College newsletter in 1998

Ode to Ragdale
(after a two-week writing residency)

On the prairie
I take measure of the landscape,
follow beiges of grass
and swallow delicious silence.
Pure potential.
Sod of desire,
blazes of promise:
the sun sets like orange satin
on a blue velvet rising
without a seam.
Words that surprise slide and shuffle unhurried
while I leave behind
the checkered grid of my life and
lull myself onto a green limb
past the morning mist
and finally, on to paper.
In the middle of the night
I turn on the bedside light
and watch the moon sprinkle 
sparkles across my room.
I read what I've spent the day writing
and then turn over
in gratitude.

Quest of the Spirit

A lizard arrived at my feet
just at the moment before
I walked into the lecture hall.
A perfectly formed, red lizard
all dried and blending into the brick path.
What made me look down in just that place
at just that moment, I don't know.
I picked it up by its curled tail
and placed it on a bent branch
of a nearby maple tree.
Then halfway down the sloping hall
I found a seat, began taking notes on shadows and
grace in 20th century poetry.
When the poet mentioned
the lizard as a messenger angel,
my pen stopped.
The lizard arrives, she said,
as a gift
when we are doing nothing--
if we are doing nothing
deeply enough.

Possession of Solitude

It's the end of November and the light grows dim.
Already my heels are deep in winter.
This past year circles with the air of survival:
I like to think a warm hand on
my excavated chest means something.
Last night I listened to your music,
touched the two stones you sent me for good luck,
and then went to bed to read, but
fell asleep within minutes.
This is how I spend my time.
Not in the Arctic doing research,
not lifting the burdens of others,
and surely not writing a book.
I can't seem to settle into solitude.
Something has altered me,
pinches now the sides of my heart.
I linger without the weight of protests
like a rune to be read.
I eat orange jelly beans in my sleep,
the color of danger, a friend adds.
And what about that red one?
Was that passion, or blood?
Or both? 

© All Copyright, 2000, Gail Hosking Gilberg.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.