POETRY NEWS FROM ALL OVER: TWO OF MY POEMS WERE PUBLISHED IN THE WINTER 2015 ISSUE OF THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY JOURNAL.

Many thanks to poetry editors Bill Wunder and Bernadette McBride for accepting “All That Light” and “Take Me Back to the Lake” for publication in the well-respected journal, the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

 Peter Krok, the editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal Print and the online SVJ atsvjlit.com, serves as the humanities/poetry director of the Manayunk Roxborough Art Center where he has coordinated a literary series since 1990.

POEMS:

All That Light
“More light”   ~ Goethe’s last words                           

Like a lover, November embraces

the full moon that reveals our collapsed

garden glowing with frost’s clarity

and the clenched leaves of cherry branches

that offer no defense against this cold.

What mazes this light reveals!

Labyrinth of cherry boughs weaves in and out,

crystalline ice networks the grass,

and heaps of fallen leaves twine the curb—

yet there is no web more complicated

than my heart into which you have found

the way.

To understand the world at all, focus

on a tiny bit of it—moonlight!—neither bent

by wind nor touched by cold—

an advancing spirit that revels in matrix

of lawn’s shadows, fabric of cherry

branches, rowdiness of hearts, and all that light

leaping—with no thought of landing.

© Marie Kane, 2015
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Take Me to the Lake                                     

Take me to the lake to marvel over two-tree
island. We pause your father’s Mad River
canoe, admire two determined sweet-birch
trees clinging to this small rock in the middle
of a backwater cove. We cut trough thick
yellow lilies rising just above the surface,
their lobed leaves’ parting whisper slides
against our canoe’s wooden sides.

You need to take me to Spectacle Island.
we’ll trespass, examine the deserted red
cabin whose dusty windows reveal inviting,
empty rooms, then lie on its worn dock,
crooked pilings leaning toward Meredith Bay.
Lake water sloshes over rough rocks that barely
rbeak surface—a nightmare for boaters without
Bizer’s map whose red x’s mark rocks
that have gashed boats open. We have a map.

Will you take me to Red Hill? Fallen oak leaves
lie slick from recent rain, foothill pines drip
wetness like heavy marbles. It’s a steep climb,
more than we thought, winded at the top—
but we ascend fire tower’s metal ladder
to view the lake’s sculpted islands—each
an irregular jade stone running to the caldera
of the Ossipee Mountains.

You have to take me to the lake!
Light falls out of August sky by degrees—
stars and planets empty and empty
themselves of light that stains all the sky
then pours between oak leaves at the end
of our dock—and still, and still, it comes.
We go to our knees for that.

 © Marie Kane, 2015