into the pool
hills hollow
forest fable forth
bride-and-grooming
us whisper-nested
flowering clouds
cast and recast shapes
shimmering a moment
shadow you naked
noonday I dive
~
night rogue stars
drill darkness
hold us
in light
the past is a woman in the other room
silent
in her always
children
feathered
in their beds
housed in evening
she in night
holding
words she learns
and unlearns
braille
of sand and wave
hieroglyph
of shell and bone
cuneiform
of cloud
still in stillness
how to decode
the history
of forgetting
Karen Earle is a poet whose work has appeared in various journals, including: Lily Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, The Denver Quarterly, the filling Station, The Hopper, Clade Song and in Tupelo Press’ The Last Millweed Anthology. She was awarded a Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing fellowship and has attended several Colrain Poetry Conferences. She earned an MFA in Poetry from University of Massachusetts/Amherst, directed the writing lab at Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, and serves as faculty member of the New Directions Program/Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge. A psychotherapist in private practice, she lives and works in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, a small town in western Massachusetts best known for its Bridge of Flowers.