Jean ValentineThe Carriers
The father was a carrier He had five buckets How did he carry it all in those five buckets? And the men on the ship. They were all carriers, heads & backs & shoulders--Lonely, father, little brothers, I miss you. So. Heavy-laden.
Gray
gray "the order of the mother" one degree Fahrenheit News armature: Expect sleet or snow west coming east You may not have wanted to be there It may have been because of the pain helicopter on your left side man asleep child on your right
Hospital: far from home
No time alone sun rain Can't talk, can't see out, can't even see to any depth down! What about youth? Its car? What about the bride's foot? cinnamon slipper-- Now you, Ohio your winter fields like covers over me--
Hospital: Dearest,
what were you doing there tonight? Where they all understood everything they said. You came to make yourself a road through the house. A room? you said, is it? It doesn't measure out. A poem? You cut it into pieces, slept under it. Time--you bore it on a green leaf under the ground.
Hospital: strange lights
I needed a friend but I was in the other room --not just the other room, another frame dragging blue or brighter blue: strange lights: The doctor singing from The Song of Songs 'in the secret places of the stairs' Us standing there in the past as we were in life you turning and turning my coat buttons
Jean Valentine is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Door in the Mountain, New & Collected Poems (Wesleyan, 2004). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America in 2000. She lives in New York City.
