Category: Poetry

Crows circle grey sky
calling to one another,
fans cheering in a bowl of clouds
the brain-crushing brutality
of winter.

I want to hang a silver chain
in a pine tree branch
to lure them closer
but I’m told it is a legend
that crows love shine.
They aren’t the ones
who steal black stones
gleaming on gravestones
tokens left by grief;
these stones are too large
to be grit for gizzards to ease
a crow’s digestion.

I love stories like this,
but stories told a million times
do not make fact.

But it’s true raccoons work the night
for brightness, collecting old keys,
bottle caps, and bits of foil left over
from yesterday’s takeaway dinner.
They gorge on garbage
then forage through trash for shine.

So here I sit counting iridescent
dust specs on apocryphal feathers,
preferring airborne legends
to the earthbound truths
brought by sifting
the swill of my sins
for what’s hidden
inside the stink,
the silver wisdom
shining.

-Kitty Yanson

I dreamed I sat in a darkening room
with many others at long tables
making food from spider webs,
by stacking them with great care
one atop another
until a whiteness emerged,
solid as air, to fill the hollows
in my daily bread.

Eyes dimmed, face covered
with networks of age,
I follow the pathways
of shadow, filigrees of light
that morning spins from night.
With delicate bones
I reticulate sidewalks,
tracing imaginary threads,
one way first, then another,
like tatting lace,
my heart the shuttle
beating time.

I walk this web that will soon
catch death in its embrace.
But in this lean time:
I feast on breath.

-Kitty Yanson

An old woman lectures me about leaves
littering the sidewalk this late in fall.
Leave me alone, I tell her.
I will collect them when time
is left over after the day’s creation
…or the week’s or month’s…
of what I’ve yet to know.
This chore is just too steep
for me today. And I just read
some article or another
that said leaving them is good
for the soil.
But not for the sidewalk,
back she yells.

I know this old woman.
My head is her shoe;
she has so many duties
she doesn’t know what to do:
the concrete exigencies of time
and obligation, washing the dishes,
doing taxes; they scrape against my mind
like rakes against walkways.

So I lace up that old woman tight in her shoe
and kick mine off, sit in a chair,
and my cat Francis, who knows the leaves
I’ve left too long; he watched each one fall
saying in his kitty brain, wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and did
becoming a great pile
of dead surprises.

He knows I’ve left the leaves too long
and just doesn’t care
as he explores paw by paw
the round perfection of my lap.

-Kitty Yanson

We sit like five points of a star,
until silence thins the veil of God.
Cathy in her steadiness reads
poems and scripture, snatches of essays
and stories teeming in intent and theme.

I am reminded of Indra’s Net,
the mythical fabric hung in the heavens
that stretches in all directions with jewels
at each fiber’s juncture. Each eye is a perfect,
singular gem, each reflects all the others:
infinity to infinity: everything holds everything,
splashed against the sky.

One by one, we speak to carve again
the opaque stones of our hiddenness,
reflecting facets that keen-edged life
has etched, each cut at a critical
angle with just the right amount of slant
for light to shoot forth to needle
a shining network shawl of meaning,
and we huddle into one
another’s words to warm
the chill of an indifferent world.

We are the power
we can see in one another’s lives,
diamonds of the first water,
each holding all, all holding each,
all, both catchers and caught, and
luminous, in the net of all wisdom.

-Kitty Yanson

Fresh snowfall looks diamond-hard,
but it is not.
My front yard now is a wilderness of blank,
but it is not
while the black crow in the snow-paled tree
saws silence with its caw.

Shaking snow from my hat, I recall
that as heat descends from the rising sun,
one by one
singular flakes
melt to feed spring,
becoming the water
they are.

The wrinkles in my face and the aching
in my arms warn that I am old,
but I am not.
I am still
the elemental being
crawling across
the kitchen floor,
clanging pots
and clashing pans
massacring quiet,
a new annunciation:

I am here!

the same being
hearing the ring
of single words
striking cold
white pages

like an Angel Gabriel
spreading his enormous wings
in a clap of thundersnow,
tending to
the solemnity of gist:

Behold!

-Kitty Yanson

Pegeen brings me dinner,
chicken salad wraps and chocolate brownies
and conversation feathered deep with affection.
I sit in my recliner, my shoulder firmly trussed,
my pain firmly entrusted to post-op oxy.
She tells me of the Thanksgiving dinner brought
in aluminum trays by the caring staff
where her father died
(Her girls even now call it
the Tin-Foil Thanksgiving.)
She speaks of telling
her mother that her husband had gone:
the family standing in the room, “Where’s Ed?”
then silence, the others stepping back,
and Peg, by standing still
pushed forward to the podium of mourning,
to speak the deep truth of death. 

I think of how waiters sometime wrap uneaten
dinners in tin foil, shaping them into swans.
But swans, in their reality, make lie our eyes’ repast:
we do not see the urgent churning below,
the power of those thighs in continuous
travail that feeds our dreams of unending ease.

We throw away the cellophane and cardboard.
My shoulder begins again to throb.
“You’ll be ok?” she asks as she gets up to leave.
I nod, as does she, in unsaid thanksgiving,
turning and returning to each other grace
that endures beneath tenebrous waters
as we paddle, serene on the surface,
across the holy sea of loss.

-Kitty Yanson

A father, teaching his son to be less afraid,
on steps, each higher, bade him jump. Again
and again, his father catches him, and trades
the risk for open arms, for love unfeigned.

But he steps aside. The boy then falls, face pale
against the floor. His father tells him: trust
completely none, not even me. This tale
is brutal. Betrayal always is. Unjust

it is but mires us nonetheless: the frost
that early comes, the love unhinged, the knees
that buckle climbing up a curb, the lost
belief that living comes with skeleton keys.

Betrayals seed hard hopes a soul might live:
Mud-buried hearts can bloom when they forgive.

-Kitty Yanson