Chapel Hill Press, Inc.
$17.48
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Kitty Foley hails from the Chicago area. She received her MA in Literature from Middlebury College and currently lives in North Carolina. Betty Adcock describes the work in her first book as "a dance with a dizzying, colorful, scary world that can come undone, the world that only a poet of Foley's intense gifts could limn so perfectly." And John Balaban praises her poems as being "unerring in finding the right gesture or natural image to summon beauty and compassion out of quandary and pain."
Maybe the Muse
Maybe the muse would sing in the dark
where houses, ignorant of stars,
whine senseless in the wind.
And shagged crows bark
from winter branches,
batting their burial wings.
Maybe the muse would sing beyond
barrenness, charm old roots to stir,
flush an eagle from sky to sky
winging over the silhouettes of crows
while earth loosens its colors.
Maybe the muse sings already
in the sparrow on the rain gutter,
in the sooty patches of snow melting
everywhere across town in the same weather,
no one knowing quite how to hum it,
but playing it nevertheless and not the same.
Chiaroscuro
At dusk by the window,
a tree’s still-glossy leaves arch
upward as if seeking bloom
in December, even as light changes.
Such light and dark played upon
our marriage, how you’d leave
with eyes closed and an open hand.
How I’d sense the tracks between
your words like prints left
after a crow has done his dance,
legible in snow.
Tonight lamplight forgives the dark…
and the ruined day.
Always I come back to you
when shadows eclipse sense.
In slower time, I see the familiar
wide hands that have shod horses.
You are scarred with kick and nails.
Hands I once held.
How strange to adore you at this distance,
almost sad, almost happy,
like the arch of leaves, a glance
of late light.
Relief at the End of November
Rain and wind knocked the rest of the leaves
down to roofs, gutters, the forest floor.
This year I’m barren as November and as honest
as the month exposing fields and woods,
and all the small, distressed gardens.
December shall be kind in comparison—
snow coming like white flowers—- a cool
feathering like trillium falling—- and ice!
—crystal that breaks without harm.
In this time of winter, no one is dying,
no one has traded love for money or theory,
no one blames anyone for not searching far enough.
Farmland goes quietly to sleep.
The rain stops. It’s still November.
A Labrador retriever romps and rolls in the dead, wet
leaves. Anyone could think of redemption.
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