Two poems from the college writing teacher and author of a new collection of poems.
Other Daughter
My childhood friend’s voice on the machine
leaves an imprint. Music from a former life.
My mother died last night, she said.
I’m calling you first
because she always thought of you
as her other daughter.
I can’t say where the voice took me just then.
I only know a shaft of autumn light
broke through the kitchen window
and now the small sun is leaving.
The earth is crowded with leaves
and lust and forgetfulness.
Today, the round world repeats itself.
New dead leaves cover the dead-end
street. I take apart a leaf and see the veins
of my own life burning.
This World
I’m tired of these small seasons, one
pressed against the other inside the parenthesis
of a sentence whose object remains a mystery.
Tired too of the ringing phone and all the doors
I must remember to close behind me.
I forget to go down to the sea, the one face
I recognize, whose wet mouth resembles
my own, and how, next to her unbuttoned
beauty, I become no one, which pleases me.
Back at the house, my garden is in upheaval.
The past creeps round trying to strangle
the future. There must be something I can do
beyond listening to the advice of strangers, that tangle
of prophecy and lie.
And yet, what would I do
without the morning deer moving over
the hill, silent as fog and moving as swiftly?
Or the sight of my daughter braiding her hair
in the half light of a sunken moon?
Today, this is all I know —
The trees are only so high, this road only so long.
Maggie Paul is a native of Boston and mother of two who moved to the Central Coast in 1997. She holds a B.A. from Rutgers, an M.A. from Tufts, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a long-time member of the Emerald Street Poets Group and was a founding member of Poetry Santa Cruz. Maggie teaches writing and Social Justice at UCSC and Cabrillo College. Her first collection of poems, Borrowed World, was published in March 2011 by Hummingbird Press.
Local Poets, Local Inspiration, edited by Robert Sward, appears weekly online and monthly in Santa Cruz Weekly. Selections are by invitation.
