little pocket poetry

                         Poems by Pauletta Hansel

Buried

Because I cannot bear to think of him,

my mother’s cat, yesterday warm

fur under my hand, now in the ground

beneath the cherry tree,

his body softening in spring rain,

I busy myself with prettying his grave.

We buried him in our yard,

not in hers—she said she had too many

hard things, roots and rocks. Because

I cannot stand here and remember

Mother’s tears at one more death,

knowing all death holds my father’s,

all loss the loss of him, I think instead

of strangers in my garden, years from now,

digging up these irises

that mark her old cat’s grave

to plant another lilac or a cherry,

finding a jawbone and the buckle of a collar

as they replace the old growth

we leave behind.

Love Poem, Upon Turning Fifty

Even at forty I could not have imagined you and the daily breathing in and out of marriage, sometimes in unison, sometimes in syncopated no-rhythm-at-all, sometimes the pant of labor or lust, but always your breath on the back of my neck as I sleep, and your hand reaching round to my waiting hand, and I could not have imagined a love poem without longing.

So much longing. So much want and need and doing without. I apologize now to myself at fifteen and thirty and even at forty for all that hunger come to naught, or not to what I thought would come to be. I’ve come to plenty, really, plenty of flesh on my bones; everything is just so comfortable rubbing up against everything else, thigh to thigh and breast to ribcage and your belly resting above my butt as we sleep; your breath, my breath, breathing not as one but as a pair of us. And me, rising to trip over that pair of your shoes flung akimbo….I could not have imagined a love poem with shoes.



Coal

By the time I knew that coal

was something more than grit and fire

in the belly of the house

and had been held in deeper

vessels than the bucket

that once sent me sprawling

down the cellar steps

and on then to the gleaming room

where the doctor stitched

a crescent moon above my eye;

by the time that coal

was more than just the crack

in daddy’s windshield, black rocks

flung from trucks careening daily

up and down our narrow road,

the coal that lined the bellies of the mountains

where our houses perched precarious

as hawks’ nests or nestled in the hollowed

places at the joining of those hills

was spent.

Only the ashy seams stitched just below 

the sassafras and pine, beneath

the redbud, dogwood, hickory and ferns, 

under the leaf-mulched soil and sandstone

still endured.

Now that’s gone too,

blasted and stripped away,

the hills a moonscape up above

the sagging houses and the towns.

The road, its hairpin

turns and crumbling berms

is gone as well;

a new highway rumbles through

the place that doctor sewed my eye:

all scars remain.