Sample Poems by Ann Silsbee
Finding Her Well
This hint of damp,
a spring?
Between these mounds of roots, a well?
In this ground dry
with needles,
fallen bark, twigs, was there soup,
coffee, water for dishes?
My dowser's tools
mosquitoes
straying from the underbrush,
footprints shadowing the dirt,
I delve into the woods'
years of detailed
forgetting,
spade until a few stones ring,
until the hole is deep enough
and earth sags in.
This must be it.
But how did she keep the water clear?
I look for stones.
All through the woods
shapes lie askew, half buried in dirt,
velveted with moss and lichen, knobbly,
lopsided, sizes I can carry.
I line the hole's
dirt walls, pile
stones deep to keep the water free
while it seeps in, swells,
lifts its small black pool.
Ga must have lugged
buckets here,
knelt down thirsty on the stones
to catch the water in her hands, thirsty
as I am to know how she lived.
I cup my palms and
drink,
taste the sweet, young roots,
as if my grandmother had spoken
from the earth to tell me where to dig.
As If A Message From Ga
Where it first grew
none of us know,
but here in my South Hill kitchen
my grandmother's
maidenhair fern
buds on as it has for more than a century,
sending small brown
spores by secret routes
to colonize my other pots, keeping
its lineage unbroken. These scions
are not the plants
she fed and tended,
guiding the slender spout of her watering kettle
to nose among the
roots, the dainty leaf-fans
not the ones her fingertips brushed to test for thirst,
nor the same stems, thin and black as message wires-
these roots toe downward
in a pot she never
packed with earth. Few molecules she loved
are left, yet light
leaks green through the leaves'
feathers, trembles the thread of silver
as it arcs from the copper spout, remembers
the hand that once
steadied mine to water
ferns in her south bay window.
Sunday Afternoon On The Ohio
Boats bloom like
lilies on the river.
Cirrus sails high in the sky's blue west.
In green canoes human
couples leaf the banks
like other river-dwellers, mud- turtles
sunning on snags
who lift lazy heads
as they slip by, doves
preening in willow
thickets,
cooing in each other's private
feathers. Everywhere
pollens
fatten with May. A great blue heron
stretches up the
long stick of his neck
like a strange fringed orchid, eyes
the boat nosing into
his tall reeds.
He's not afraid of lovers-slow
people who pay no
attention
to his hen nesting on a branch
nearby-who put their
paddles down,
clamber into the canoe's ribbed
belly, shoulder to
chest, hip to hip,
breathe into each other's heart-pods.