Broadsides - Ann Staley

Willamette Valley, Late March

Winter rains in the Cascades,

Days and nights of its arriving

on Pacific winds,

as cool mist or piling-up,

gun-metal clouds along the ridges.

If you come to this western valley

prepare for wet blessings:

28 kinds of moss and lichen, rust,

moisture-soaked ferns,

puddles outside your doorway,

a succession of umbrellas

you lose and find

and for lost and found days.

You stay inside with a steaming cup

and the book you've been meaning to read,

the one your brother sent

for last year's birthday.

At night

when the cars and people settle,

when the cats are sleeping on our laps,

and there is nothing--

nothing you can do

to avoid your life--the ghosts, the voices,

your imperfect self--

take comfort in the sound of rain,

the great privacy of water falling,

its belief in gravity,

its faith in the hereafter.

Ann Staley

2017

Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Red Monday

with thanks to Charles Wright

Only those who are living are able to die,

the others are already in the Great Beyond.

Voiceless without a word to say

deaf with the sound of Bach.

Desire In Its Highest Form,

the cats sleeping, entwined in the back bedroom.

Two flowering azaleas, steady heartbeat after a decade,

the cold of mid winter.

Make of yourself a light, the Buddha said.

But what kind of light? A light house, a candle, a porchlight?

April is the cruelest month, said T.S. Eliot.

The damp becomes emerald green.

My soul is on fire.

Ann Staley

2016

Victoria Day, Tiring The Heart

Along with the Department of Homeland Security

Employee Eligibility Form

which I'm filing - after teaching the workshop,

I have an index card laboriously printed by my friend

at Stoneybrook Retirement Home. It reads,

Irving Wallace rote "Word."

Joe passes this to me at the Farmer's Market

three months after a conversation during which,

he reminds me, this topic arose.

I'm saving it in honor of Joe's diligent memory,

his struggle to write and because it contains

one of the few absolute truths in these lines -

an objective fact, unless Irving was guilty

of some form of plagiarism. But I digress.

I have, as well, a spring haiku from the

Japanese freestyle master Taneda Santoka,

who commented, a couple of centuries ago,

mountains and ocean/too much beauty

(No end punctuation in haiku!)

At the bottom of this little pile, a poem

by Thomas R. Smith, begins,

It's like so many other things in life,

and now I'm smiling as I think of how

these many things - forms and Homeland

Security, retirement, memory,

even the too-much beauty of the world,

are, indeed, things to which we say no or yes

and also, the very things which faithfully deliver this life,

the one I am leading near the small stack of papers at my desk

as I breathe spring.

Ann Staley

2016