The Blessing of the Rain

The boys in the backyard turn into vine maples
when I put my glasses on.  St Francis is in the weeds
at the far end of the lawn, in last year’s tangled garden,
and beyond that my two bone dogs are buried
under the long grass.

Dense, formed clouds crowd the sky,
raindrops and ripples in the birdbath,
a stippling of the pane, vine maples turned back into ghosts
of neighborhood kids grown and gone away.
The sudden shower fills the empty spaces
of my small world ―
my small childless marriage,
how it has lasted, how it might end.
I make coffee in the morning
and fill my cup.

The Fields of Queen Anne’s Lace

On long summer days, mother would say,
“Don’t come back until dinnertime,”
lock the screen door, and park on the couch with coffee
and a book in the den, reading fiercely.

My brothers went one way, my sister another,
and I would take the dog and wander
the wide fields of Queen Anne’s Lace
around our subdivision, free to make up
lies, steal candy from the mini-marts
out on the highway.

Queen Anne’s Lace is a pasture pest of a plant,
its flower an umbrel cupping sweetly
like a bird’s nest above a festoon of bracts
on a willowy stem. It resembles deadly
water hemlock, was once used
to induce abortion, has a tiny red blossom
like a drop of blood in the center
of the cupped nest.

When she was in her forties, a stroke
left mother brain-damaged and gentle, unable
to read, unable to recall my name, even though
it is her name and my father’s linked, unable
to ask why none of her children
have children.

Off Season Hours

I move a kitchen chair to the porch on an empty morning,
with an Elmore Leonard novel I started to read last spring.
I start over at the beginning.  It’s a Monday near September’s end,
tourists gone home, shops gone on off-season hours.
Out over Tillamook Bay pelicans are circling,
and there’s Eric’s small open boat following them, because he knows,
and I know, pelicans follow schools of herring,
and so do salmon.

At the end of another chapter of this book,
which has no cover,  and a few missing pages,
I look up ― instead of pelicans and Eric, the salmon seeker,
is a flock of white gulls scared up and shrieking
and the crazy border collie Belle running up and down the beach.

The noon whistle.  Noon already.
Coffee and cream cheese bagels for now, bean soup for later,
maybe salmon, who knows, tomatoes, some greens,
half a bottle of Pinot Gris,
a few beers, Full Sail, Black Butte, Cascade Ale.

No meteor showers forecast.  I can go to bed early if I want.
The girlfriends drop by at sunset to sit around, complain ―
crows at the bird feeders, men at the bar, raccoons in the trash.
We wait for the green flash no one has ever seen.

Death School

You’ve been visiting with death,
flying back and forth across the country,
peering into your mother’s old eyes to see if it’s there yet.

When death visits it leaves a door just barely open
and you think you can look through the crack, sniff
the air of that other place, but you can’t, and you shouldn’t
and only being a good daughter makes you think otherwise.
There are death professionals like priests and physicians
and hospice workers, and they don’t look through the door,
don’t listen for the calls of strange birds in the rare air.
Priests and physicians and hospice workers learn
in death school to open the door but not peek,
not to eavesdrop on death’s aimless and one-sided conversations.

You fly home, long flights over the whole wide country
and death rides along.  Do you let it have the window seat
or the aisle seat?  Do you read it the poems you write about it?
Does it fall asleep and drool on your shoulder,
onto that pretty brocade scarf you always travel with?
Does it snore gently in your ear,
does it talk in its sleep, do you listen
for it to say your name?

Life After Powell’s

It was the first summer I hadn’t worked
in thirty years, a daze of late mornings
and open-ended afternoons. The History of Tanganyika
lay on the kitchen counter, Things Past
under the bed with the dust, Jupiter’s Many Moons
in the bathroom, a notebook about a drunk poet
open on the arm of the sofa.

Bindings are broken, and the old glue
smells like my second grade classroom
at the end of summer ― dried apples
on the windowsill, beautiful, wrinkled and ruined.

The truth that comes in a dream in the daytime
is gone when I wake up.  Instead, my spaniel sleeps
on the sofa with the poet, her curly toes in the air, dreaming
of me.  I wake her up and we go for a walk.
The park is a city where tall fir trees
move past still clouds.  Dandelions,
buttercups, a bench in someone’s memory,
a 1959 penny heads up, itinerant deities
out and about in the black and white world seeking
a rhyme for orange.

Joanna Rose writes and teaches in the northwest. Her novel Little Miss Strange (Algonquin) won an award. Her poems show up in likely and unlikely places (Bellingham Review, The Oregonian, Four and Twenty, Artisan Journal, 2GQ, Montana Review, Bugaboo, Ugly/Pretty, and the right leg of her husband's blue jeans while they're driving to Seattle). Her essays are about teaching, dogs, and teaching dogs, which is something else she does. She wants to live at the beach and write about pelicans and sand and what water does to light.

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