Stuff I’ve made

Driving a highway in Eastern Washington (Molly See)

Posted: December 9th, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Poetry | Tags: , | No Comments »

OdessatoHarrington

My teacher was compiling a list of Oregon poets and my aunt, Molly (Carr) See came to my mind–she was brought up in Hood River so clearly counts as an Oregon poet, even if she spent more of her adult life in Washington state. I looked online and aside from the usual irritation of searching for anything with “See” in the search string, I couldn’t find any of her poems online. This seems a shame, as she wrote some beautiful poems. Here’s one:

Driving a highway in Eastern Washington

Odessa to Harrington,
lonesome songs.
Field stubble,
cloud ripple,
shadows of grey and yellow.
Bottom lands flat as if they’d been sanded.
Fields fallow
done for the year,
combed up in waves, warm, brown.
Once in a while
lost in the hollows,
a town.


Looking West on a Humid Summer Evening

Posted: August 15th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Poetry | 2 Comments »

The secondhand AC
ran for ten minutes–
then the glass fuse melted.

Out this same window,
above clashing dishes,
waiters on smoke break,
musty ailanthus,
dim TV dialogue–
with one move
swing to the fire escape.
Parallel the roaring ductwork
up to a broad tarred
and silver space.

Soot covers your hands.

See, higher than flat Key Food,
the avenues of treetops, cornices, spires,
the bank clocktower glowing green and red over Atlantic and Flatbush,
a silent buzzing silhouette of City,
the statue’s gold torch above the harbor,
murky thunderheads over Jersey
like lost stratovolcanoes.


Lighting the leaves

Posted: June 7th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Poetry | 1 Comment »

After three days the same,
Sun creeps through the forest,
Lighting the leaves,
Taller each noon.

Sun creeps through the forest
On fireproof stilts;
Taller each noon,
More jaunty in his step.

On fireproof stilts
He takes to the branches–
More jaunty in his step,
He’s gliding.

He takes to the branches–
Then, one day,
He’s gliding
Above the bright buds.

Then, one day,
Slowly bringing you,
Above the bright buds,
All the gold in the world.

Slowly bringing you,
After three days the same,
All the gold in the world
Lighting the leaves.


Laurels

Posted: August 15th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Poetry | 1 Comment »

You can grow tired of looking at the laurels;
June woods are lousy with these pink-white constellations.
Grandmother’s tires drift down the backroads
Like a team of studied horses
The track’s in their rubbery bones.
Passing periwinkled foundations,
Resolute in the years-deep leaves,
Rusted fences fastened to trunks,
The sun on the dark fallen firs.

Out into a slanting pasture–
Again, across there, she gestures at laurels.

But wise grandmothers point ’cause they know
The thinking of the shining leaf,
the gnarled branches that lift from bitter stony soil;
They can be burnt to the ground thrice-over.
Consider these returning flowers.