Laurie Lamon

My Neighbor Calls from Montana

The transmission went. Then everyone

got Covid. Would I water the strawberries

and tomatoes through the fence. What else,

I ask, can we do. What are your symptoms.

Sing praises for science, she writes back.

I answer, yes. In Ukraine the national flowers

are gray mosaics. Africa has the highest increase

in flooding in proportion of population

exposure, says the global flood database.

I spray through the fence, looking for red:

one cherry, the strawberries still pale,

then coil the hose and pull dead hosta leaves

from the bed on our north side.

A week ago I found another dead mouse

beneath the birdfeeder—a new neighbor’s

cat, no longer tentative. I wrapped

and placed it here in the shade beneath leaves

near the bins. Every day water rises.

Someone waits to be born. Someone walks

in floodwater chest high. Someone walks

to the border of his country, not lost. Torn.

 

Last spring, a seal dragged to shore

was photographed within the circle someone thought

to draw around it in the sand, the camera angle making

visible the footprints of those who had stopped as though at a door

one has been taught before opening to touch for heat,

and the shallow pools of some who kneeled there as it slept.

Autumn Equinox

I saved the communion wafer

and folded the program into a shape for flight—

what I remembered as her husband lifted

boxes of her books into my car.

The air surrounding him: autumn light

a hive with harp and shadow.

Once I saw her at a street fair, yellow

dress, bare-armed, alive.

I thought of the hour of a winter

wedding when I slipped into a pew beside her

and our shoulders touched so that I heard

when she said, oh you are wearing tulip sleeves.

 

Again, after wind,

by porch light I find herbs and flowers toppled,

heavy with late growth,

clay rims scattering flakes, and swarms of ants

where I set them upright. We need

to pull up the tomatoes, I tell my husband.

We need to drain the fountain, and this watering—

I’m done watering in the dark.

Because We Looked for You

The window broken by hand
was a spell   the alphabet to unspeak:
to have. house anchor. pieces.

Because our eyes’ unseizable vision.
Because you trembled us.
Because we looked for you

because we were children.
Now I am this old. How do I
press my body unto the earth.

See you.

Breath

When we met in the IHOP parking lot,
his breath was sharp with more
than coffee and smoke.

I used to sit on his lap and comb his hair,
lift his watch and slide it over my fist,
up my arm. I wanted the hour

hand to move fast.
When he knew what he didn’t have left
to say, I could hear his breathing

like mine afterward—
the big hand moving, the pounding
of children’s feet on the stairs.