Winter Breath

An iron wind
of winter breath
blooms white between
my field of spring
and sleep's old whisper

©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

cloud and wood

Stand beneath
the still cloud
that you watch freeze
like cold wood
Laugh at the sound
of always

©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

A Midden of Scarcity

The authority of the screech owl
sweeps winter's lonesome feast
into a midden
of scarcity. The fox
is the thicket's fire-tender,
the crow's command
the hidden constellations'
laughing paradox
of edge.


©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

This is just something I put together today while playing with found poem words from Hal Borland's old book Sundial of the Seasons.

This Book

This book woke me up.
This book has a stain of sesame oil on the fourth page, near the end of the recipe.
This book helped me name my cat.
This book has the address of an old friend scrawled in purple ink on the final page.
This book has a crazy woman living in it, trying to bust out of the attic and prone to setting beds on fire.
This book rambles on forever but ends up with an affirmation unlike any other.
This book opened itself right up to a poem about a hawk last night when I went to read it.
This book made my student ask me to call him "Nobody." I said I would, and he started writing poetry.
This book wanders through my dreams at night.
This book contains a bolt of white silk and a quote from Townes van Zandt.
This book spent its nights under my pillow until I finished reading it.
This book wants to grow wings and fly off the deck down into the dry leaves.
This book is illuminated and came back to me after a foolish absence.
This book reminds me of invented colors.
This book was made into a movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. and when I saw the movie I stopped reading the book.
This book is missing the flyleaf and endpage because I used them to start a campfire when all I had in the forest was damp wood.
This book helped me pass a big test.
This book has mobsters and baseball stars in it, and I still wonder what happened.
I was reading this book to my mother the night before she died, and there is a fighting tom in it, and a tree with lights, and the parenthetical holographic remembrancewords "That's nice."
This book is a cathedral.
This book makes me want to go listen to Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire" real loud.
This book is part of the ninth grade public school curriculum but shouldn't be. The Cold War is over.
This book is dotted with winsome purple asterisks next to words that aren't verbs.
This book has a picture of my grandparents in it, sitting in a metal glider on their front porch.
This book is really a stage spotlit with mauve footlights and strewn with crumpled roses.
This book makes itself obnoxious when I see it but demands to be read.
This book has a dogwood blossom in it, pressed between the words of Pascal and Buber.
This book delivers a mighty punch and honors all its promises.
This book has a wheel of runaway cheese in it.
My late grandmother spilled something on this book, on the cover and then again in the part with the crazy goatman.
This book won't leave me alone.
This book has a streak of lightning in it that split a woman's life open.
This book hopes it will be written soon.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

Dictionary

Revisiting the dictionary I grew up with, I inventory the artifacts between its pages. It’s a child’s book, illustrated with whimsy and deliberation. A little forest of coral hangs out in the Cs: a tiny inky heart of stalky reaching. Even then I collected paper. Tags. Inhabitants of a house of words: a bookmark I made in the fifth grade for a boy I had a crush on. A progress report from that same year. A birthday note in spidery script from an elderly maiden aunt. (I’d liked the way she made her capital L’s, how they swung out so much wider than every other letter.) A blue ribbon for a picture I took of my old gray cat, reclining on flagstones next to boxed petunias. A nine-year-old’s Christmas wish list (a telescope, some Smarties in my stocking, a set of watercolors, a blank book I’d seen with an owl on the front). An incoherent note from a girl I barely knew. A thimbleful of purple confetti stuck with glitter and glue to the definition of “trellis.” Someone’s name, in orange crayon on black construction paper, smudged.

Laura Sorrells
© 2007 all rights reserved

almost

steaming water engulfs
dry linden buds--
almost silent

©laura sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

Fade

An austere resilience
anchors this patchwork
of ark and territory,
cajoles a leaking eddy
of vertigo away from
the directives of dreamtime.
Landmarks mimic palaces,
then unmark themselves
completely. Some blank
untelling vanishes the birthrights
of air and forest.
When does the pirate
become the melancholy saint,
tethered by the silent slide
of an inexorable forgetting?

--Laura Sorrells
© 2010 All rights reserved.