My Octopus Teacher
When the film had played out and I thought, what a wonderful and dangerous life, all under the sea where a forest of plants sways in constant waves and surprising animals that seem flora stud the floor, and sharks range through seeking food, then I wondered what the being’s three hearts could feel as her arms run in eight directions like the eights limbs of yoga, ancient sayings for a full spiritual life.
Amazed, I watched her escape from jaws, hiding herself in rock crannies then rocketing through the salty ceiling to pure air.Then she waited and waited on a sunlit rock until she had to return to her element for breath. She folded her arms around nearby shells held close on herself. She transformed into a fantastic disguise, a ruse of a rock or plant, an armor the sharks were too primitive to detect.
She was smart, witty, she was fun. And when the diver held her to his bare heart, she lay there calm, content, gathering her limbs around herself. She snuggled in as a child in a mother’s two arms.
Sky Over Conway
So quiet today
air still as the flat
boulder I’m waiting on
White pines over
a white Baptist steeple
To the west, trucks
and cars churn toward the malls
My husband sits inside
in a clinic chair
I wait
I wait
I wait
more
High Prussian blue sky
white puffs boulder-size
harmony of notes
on a page
How thoughtless
this blue
too vast to read
I left a satchel
of work home
Useless day!
Where I sit
disintegrates
pebbles smaller than peas
loosen into my hand
How long will he be?
Sun prints
the asphalt drive
with leaf shadows
sharp as Matisse cut-outs
Traffic whisks by
Nothing stays
This Quiet Place
This morning is bright, light leaning toward June
I press my lips to the cold glass doors
Stark skies whisper white ice
Far off July’s unconcerned
And you’re still sleeping
What month? what year? how many more?
What month what year will you leave me?
On that day I’ll be looking for you
Wisp of blue-white cloud? transparent wings?
Touch on my shoulder like a moth’s antenna?
In that night alone with your wrecked body
The years like woolen blankets laid in cedar
I’ll wonder how in the world I can go on
As in the years before you parted the aril to the intimate chamber
Before I bathed in rain before I invited you in
Birches
Up among bronzed oaks reddened maples the high slim birches stretch their arches toward the tops of eighty-foot white pines
green as summer days they rise with the grace of ancient churches
A long high wind shimmers their gold-coin leaves in the cool autumn sun shakes then like a dancer’s jingling belt and liquid skill with the veil
winding in the arms of embracing air casting light down on bone limbs and disheveled brown grasses coming to be
Rosemary Winslow lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband John, a visual artist. She teaches at Catholic University. Her work has appeared in 32 poems, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Crux. She published a collection of poems in 2007 entitled Greenbodies.
Her articles on Whitman have included the influence of Egyptology on his work, and Whitman’s prosodic practice and influence on the Modernists. She has received the Larry Neal Award for Poetry twice and Writer’s Fellowships from the DC Commission for the Arts and The Vermont Studio Center.