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.
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
