Laurie Lamon

Farther

It is dusk. A dog is loose and runs,
loping across lawns, a toy in its mouth.
In the pines behind houses, owls call.
The sound of smoke, I think. Not sorrow
which is our own affair.
You did not know when our old dog died.
Or that I am old now, or that I waited.
I waited to burn your letters.

The Museum of Ugly Things

June
Her eyes’ waiting through miles of wheat. The river.
A homestead the color of blizzard.
I waited in the car and smoked. Place of her birth, Stevensville,
Bitterroot Valley. Again I have brought her here.
I watched her shutter-walk toward memory’s slammed door.

May
She has been moved.
Hospice.
There would be a nametag, kindness. Who are you here to see.
I message my husband. I’m in the parking lot.
Estrangement: ghost heart.
This can be explained.
What is your name.
Her farmhouse not yet torn down.

June
Bitterroot:
what had we noticed that led us from the car to river bank—
beneath wheat and chamomile, rusted tracks. Broken metal and masonry
we examined as though at a nursery—this to hold up vines,
this to hold water for ground birds.
We walked looking down like Bishop’s sandpiper—
after fog and disappearance, the world
uncanny—
here was river and stone bright as fish scale. Light was
splinter awake.

The year not yet torn down.

January
Let doors be kicked open. Let vandals. Graffiti. I step on glass and take photos, video.
Living room kitchen bathroom. Walls broken for wire and pipe. Sink and toilet. Rags.

A doll’s head.

Let fire. Another fire.
Years.
I knock on her bedroom wall.
It’s me, I say.

Laurie Lamon is the author of two poetry collections from CavanKerry Press: The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings. She won a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, The New Republic, Plume, Ploughshares, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and The Literary Review. She is retired from a professorship at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. “Breath” first appeared in Mary: A Journal of New Writing.