In recognition of Poetry Month, and to celebrate and highlight our treasure trove of Orcas Island poets, Orcas Issues is pleased and honored to again offer daily poetry during April.

PRESERVING THE FLOWERS

— by Laurel Rust —
Every night, last thing
before going to bed,
my mother would pick up
from the kitchen table
the vase of cut flowers she bought weekly
at Fred Meyer. She’d carefully carry it
out into the garage, where it was cool
and dark, so the flowers would last longer.
She’d turn off the kitchen light,
the hallway light, and in the bathroom
undress, put on her long nightgown
and the net bonnet
that preserved her styled and sprayed hair.
Then, in the dark
she’d lie down beside her sleeping husband.
All night, the cut flowers
remained in the garage,
out of the forced heat and glare
of the family house,
while my mother slept
in a different coolness,
a different dark

PREPARING TO MOVE

— by Laurel Rust —
The calculator shows my new cabin
might be fifty square feet
larger than this narrow, matchstick
apartment. I measured
with my grandmother’s old cloth
tape, the one she used
for sewing. Curtains,
mostly. Table cloths. Plain,
she said, no gingerbread.
 
My journals, scrapbooks,
Grandmother’s treadle Singer,
her cedar hope chest,
are all shut up in storage. Here
in this tiny apartment,
all I can afford, my single bed
is shoved against a wall, pots
and pans stored
in the oven. I have little room for objects
that keep the past near, little space
for space Yet absence
crowds me: my son
at three, at nine, the lover
I lost, the tent
in Utah’s west desert, the rain
I woke to on the coast of Ireland
forty years ago.
I am packing up again,
preparing to move.
The file folders of regret,
and such dust. I choke
on my own story, then hear
Grandmother’s wild laugh.
Fiddlestix! she says.
She scrubs tin cans,
washes worn-out rags,
folds newspapers and letters
before she carries it all
out to a burn barrel
in her back alley.
Bright embers rise
in the humid Illinois air.
My stars! she says,
my stars!

MORNING, RAIN

— by Laurel Rust —

Rain patters on the roof
like someone drumming their fingers
on a desk, waiting. Sky
is the color of old silverware.
Outside, the faces of potted pansies bow
like mourners, or faithful monks, Rain
seems somehow always
morning, waking
with that background husssh
and shhhh that may be rain
or may be waking; the half-light
a mercy, a thin curtain, neither bright
nor dark. Rain
is the day coming right down
to us, unbidden
but given, drawing us, long
and blind as earthworms
out of the saturated darkness
onto the ground of day.
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