BETTER WITH FRIENDS, by Helen Losse

Cover by Bill Losse



Better With Friends
Rank Stranger Press (2009)
$14.00 plus $2.50 S & H ($16.50)

send check with your mailing address and any instructions for personalization to:

Helen Losse
2569 Wood Valley Road
Winston-Salem, NC 27106


About the Author

Helen Losse is a poet, free lance writer, and Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Shape of a Box, Lily, Ghoti, Right Hand Pointing, and Blue Fifth Review. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing and Paper Snowflakes, available from Southern Hum Press. Educated at Missouri Southern State and Wake Forest Universities, she lives with her husband in Winston-Salem, NC where she occasionally writes book reviews for literary magazines.

"I moved like a poet—laboring—/under the weight of the burden of truth," Helen Losse declares in the first poem from Better With Friends. A poet does indeed labor, but in a poem, what is the truth? Losse shows us the unrelenting details of decline and death in "The Kidnapping of Aimee." The soiled sheets, the stench of old age, the waiting upon death, but these details are not the only "truth" in this or any of other poem in this collection. How does the spirit shine through the labors of time? How does soul dance with the world given to us--family, friends, suffering, pleasure? Losse shows us how in these poems, rich as they are in the details that embody our lives. This is indeed the poet's labor brought to fruition. KSB



Imagine

So I begin again in solitude
on the morning of the first day in January.

The sky is dark, and the Christmas tree not
yet removed. Gently the rain starts falling,

making the trunks of the back-yard trees
barely visible. A light shines in a window.

An American flag on a pole
blows in the breeze. The pole is beside the house

across the right of way. I’ve not noticed that flag
before. Perhaps, it’s a Christmas flag. One our

neighbors got as a gift, and just now—
in the new year—found the time to install.

When the wind stops blowing, the flag disappears,
and all I see is a yard full of trees. So did

anything change while I slept? I
imagine a garden with a wrought iron gate.

The gate opens to a world in which
John Lennon is a younger man. I see, too,

the famous “Godfather of Soul,”
humming to yellow roses:

Humming the prayer of my heart:
O my God, to see.


To Be

A house is visible behind the right of way.
I hate that house, and sometimes, when it
disappears in the fog, pretend it isn’t there.

I sit in my chair and look into the yard.
I imagine I belong. But this morning
after the yard was white with snow—

later when the brown grass emerged from its
hiding like a flag newly un-furled—
the house snickered. “Over here,” it called,

waving and fluttering its shutters,
hoping for eye contact like our patulous neighbor
with her other seasonal and too-tight pants.
 

Prayer At the Open Window

In the solitude, I ponder life’s meaning.
I have looked but not really seen.
Because a window is open

does not mean the air is full of light.
Perhaps, I have played too many games—
evenings and mornings,

drinking in foolishness with my coffee—
and failed to heed a lesson given. Or,
perhaps, I barely listened. But I’m

asking now. There is so much to ponder,
as I gaze upon the tree line,
where just last week another doe came

bolting through the yard. At first,
I thought it was a dog. But no dog leaps
with such magnificence. No, not even

the greyhound. I know that. I see that.
So why not the rest? If there’s really
an answer for every question,

no mystery behind heaven’s gate, then I have
argued and lost. Surely, something
hides in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.

Thrown Out
—for Alice

How many times has the wind sung
new verses to our familiar choruses,

we’ve seen only the clouds
and misread the signs?

We seek peace in a mirror. And looking,
when we should have been listening,

missed prophetic thunder
in the blackening of trees.

But new birth accents the possible,
disguised in the freshness of a sudden, spring rain.

The time has come
to throw out spoiled milk.

There are evergreens already,
birds singing low in the brush.

Yet how many nights
have we slept on old, cotton sheets,

clinging to comfortable tintypes,
content with the smaller of joys?



On the Other Side of the River

Rumor has it, God lives
on the opposite side of the river,

stands on the cliff
near a tree-covered gorge,

charges past slippery rocks
into slime that looks like moss.

The river’s wide
with turbulent rapids.

Some, below in the water,
have enough buoyancy to float.

Not many.

A skiff is moored nearby,
and sharp branches

jut from the shore.
And from what I see

near the river’s shallow edge,
it appears that God is not at home.


Whirlybirds

We always called maple seeds whirlybirds,
just as we always did so many things, as children.
We liked them best when they were yellow—

when tossed alone, in twos, or even bunches—
they came swirling down. Too green,
they fell with a plop. Too brown, too thin to fly,

or they fell apart, exposing their spider veins
like the vertical strings on a badminton racket.
If we had rain, mush, beside the welcome mat.

But this morning, sailing swiftly by my window,
catching the light—white and lovely,
delicate of drift—landing in a driveway crack

or in gutters in the fertile loam that once was
other maple leaves, those ’copters from the sky—
unshaken in purpose—became a circle of trees.