Jeanette Cabanis-Brewin is POET OF THE MONTH OF JANUARY 2011

from Patriate – two wintery January poems
by Jeanette Cabanis-Brewin

Snowday Quartet
i.

A river

of air flows

above the river. As sky

lives on the surface of water

another life, so the life of water

reflects in frozen air, streaming.

When the river ducks her head

beneath the bridge, her airy sister

leaps lightly over, invisible except

that she bears the snow, strewing

whitewater blackice

across my path.

ii.

wild carrots tatting

a winter crop of lace for their Queen

each brittle brown chalice fills with it

and with a peace

undisturbed by the commerce of bees.

iii.

on each blackiced twig

snow piles to a certain depth

only

then wisely falls,

letting go of what can-

not in safety be borne,

feeling the relief of

weightlessness.

iv.

see us    fading back to no-color,

to sepiatone, to black

and white images,

a wonderful life.

we do less

and what we do—chop wood, light

fire, heat water—is briefly

enough.

To the Bear Killed Last Night on Flat Gap

I never saw you.

You appeared, loping

            through the neighbor’s raspberries,

            standing up beside the spring to observe her passing car.

You were seen at dawn, swimming

            the Tuckaseigee River, but not by me.

You left your signature everywhere

            on my world:

           

            dead pines clawed naked

            poke bushes flattened, stripped of berries

            plum branches broken down to the ground

            wasp nests scooped from the earth.

I learned to read

            the way your life was writ            next to mine.

Forgive me, neighbor. I lay awake

            and listened as you were hounded

            to your death.

The hills around the house echoed with it,

            and with what was silent there:

                        your lonely sacrifice.

Like the Levite, I crossed over the road

            into sleep with my hands clean.

Bio:

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, a business writer and editor by day, writes for a variety of print and online publications on business topics, and has been co-editor or co-author of several business books, including two winners of the Project Management Institute’s literature award. But in her real life, her poetry has been published in The Nomad, the Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage, in the anthologies Tree Magic (SunShine Press, 2004), The Gift of Experience (Atlanta Review, 2005), Immigration, Emigration, Diversity (Chapel Hill Press, 2005), and The Moveable Nest (Helicon Press, 2007). She was a finalist in the Atlanta Review’s poetry competition in 2000 and 2005, and in the 2000 Greensboro Awards. Her chapbook, Patriate, won the Longleaf Press Open Chapbook Competition and was published by Longleaf in 2007. She lives and works in the forks of Blackbird Branch on the eastern slope of Cullowhee Mountain in the company of a dozen or so Cuckoo Marans chickens, a few hundred thousand Italian honeybees, two dogs and one husband.


Want a copy of Patriate? Buy it at City Lights Bookstore. Click here.

http://www.citylightsnc.com/search/apachesolr_search/Patriate%20by%20Jeanette%20Cabanis%20Brewin


Published at Long Leaf Press