Jeanne Murray Walker

I felt it, riding through the afternoon—
the nights are getting shorter and it’s cold
and then the baby shifted in my womb
and the innkeeper sent us to his sandy field....

You can feel his heartbeat slow
            as he loiters just off the Expressway,...

The scarlet petals were floppy as old hats
by March, and falling into piles on the rug,
so I cut its plastic pot to free its roots
and laid it by the compost in the mud....

How can children read, with words
wobbling any way they feel like?
Spelling shows up as speling,
and spelin spills to spleen. Stolen...

     In the nightmare of the dark
     All the dogs of Europe bark,...

      There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry....

In medieval paintings, the cobbler stood just inches high
        beside the saints, who rose like water towers,...

You’ve gone AWOL and only
Jesus can bring you back, not this
poem that I began with the lie
that we can overhear your laughter,
not hubris or tears and rain....

Those days, I sat on our front porch
holding my daughter, my arms
and chest vibrating with joy like a tuning
fork. Atoms of our happiness fell in
on one another like gears turning...

      Good Friday, 2004

Since time flies one way like an arrow,
the sugar can’t be stirred out of your oatmeal...

Chariot from Hades, fire
glinting from its windshield, steel
knife splitting the atom
to pull in front of me,
so close now I can see
the driver, her phone, can hear...

Going down the list: after against among
around, I think how trivial they are,
how low their self-esteem,
how like safety pins they merely connect....

Not that you couldn’t reach Him if you tried
(maybe you couldn’t) but that you no longer try.
Your last real prayer? In a plane, beseeching...

This morning shows up at my bedside
like a mother holding a glass of water,
so I say thank you, glancing out the window
at the tiny farmhouse flung into the lap...