by Gerald McCarthy

Grief was the name of your friends’ dog —
a black Labrador that ran off
along the shore of Lake Michigan,
the summer you turned twenty–eight.

Hope is green, my grandfather said,
like the spring, and Hope
the name of a woman
you knew in Iowa, someone
who promised dinner
& a cool drink. You got the drink.

Sleep is a dark hood
you pull over your head
when the night comes
& there are only stars.

Truth, the general said,
is varied — truth has a slow fuse.
No, truth is the one thing
it touches all things
that touch the heart.

by Elizabeth Tibbetts

So this is my winter life at night
tucked in bed alone with a book of poems
and a magazine (my secret vice) that professes
to simplify life by expounding on clothes
that make one thinner, age–defying creams,
and closets. Usually I flash past ads and head

to the advice which never tells me what
I really want to know. But a few issues back
a pair of shoes snagged me so bad I moaned,
went so far as to seek them out. I gazed at
those heels — black velvet, patent leather trim,
and skinny straps — like I was some scruffy kid

with her nose pressed against the bakery
window. I couldn’t spend two hundred bucks
on shoes, or five hundred for the right dress,
or the hundred grand for the life. I bought
the four–dollar lotion recommended for skin
in the dead of winter. I swear I’ll never buy

another issue. But then, when days are short
and lines in the grocery store, long, and I long
to tuck myself between the sheets and flip
picture to picture, one slips like sin into my cart.
So here I am, a few pages into Ahkmatova,
standing in snow with her outside the prison gates.

The world has come down around us — and never
stops. When I can’t take any more of what’s cupped
inside these poems, I’ll close her book and reach out
my guilty hand for that fat magazine and join
my sisters across this land, being lulled by the most
ordinary advice into some semblance of sleep.

by Elizabeth Tibbetts

If I didn’t walk these grass paths,
fit my fingers to the stones to trace
names and dates, births and deaths,

if I didn’t count the last breaths
of the dying, how could I know
that I too will soon lie down

and give back my heart and lungs,
even clothes, to repose a bone pot,
sprung basket, a silenced clatter,

to become matter the flung–open
lilac seeks, or the hydrangea,
heady with blooms, roots for,

dowsing in the dark among bone
constellations and scattered
erratic stars: diamond, buttons, teeth?

by Elizabeth Tibbetts

It’s    a hot May day at the graveyard:
enough breeze to keep black flies away,
leaves sunning their green naked selves,
an unseen brook’s no beginning /no end,
and the dead shelved beneath the mown lawn.

My mother, her cane in one hand and a pot
of marigolds for her brother in the other,
wanders back through family names. I see
clearer than ever the neat lines of bones —
all the careful suits, shoes, and dresses now gone.

All around us common purple lilacs bloom.
She sets the flowers on the ground, straightens
her back and my uncle’s flag. Bear tracks
engrave the earth by his stone. The bird feeder
is gone. He must have ambled in beneath

a spoonful of moonlight, stood upright
as a man in his black, shaggy coat, grabbed
the feeder between his clawed paws, and shook
the gritty seed as though it were sugar
into his coming–into–summer–hungry mouth.