Sample Poems by Kay Barnes

Trying to Find Her

I think of her one human love
other than family, how she withdrew
from what she wanted, fought it
by concealment, how unmodern that was,
as I travel alone from Paris
to her shrine in Lisieux. Tricky streets
of half-timbered houses, their Norman roofs,
like monks’ hoods, darkening windows.
Aisles of doorless shops populated
by miniature Carmelites in water bubbles,
plastic gewgaws of Thérèse and her father,
teakwood rosaries, paper bookmarks
of her hands folded, her feet in hemp sandals.

Open two to four: a diorama where    
Main Moments Live Again in Wax.
A sundown spectacular, son et lumière:
“The True Face of the Saint,” fourteen francs.
In the convent chapel, tourists whisper
by a Carmelite mannequin
laid out like Snow White
in a glass casket, its stubborn off-center chin
an effigy of hers, then bow their heads
up the hill to the bulbous basilica
built in her honor, beneath the north cloister
a Carmelite cell reconstructed
for apocryphal relics.

In a fever’s vision
young Thérèse—“innately
dyspeptic,” writes an older sister—
saw the pious relatives gathered around her,
a fence of onion heads,
and retched. On the threshold
of her red brick childhood
hope comes back:
I can pull her through, I say
to myself, like a silk scarf.

Cemetery Music
    for Myrtle Powell Cavanaugh,
    (December 14, 1906 – July 11, 1981)
    
A grain elevator stands at the far side of the cemetery,
a giant white pitch pipe on guard,
four barrels opening to heaven.
Nothing to hear but a hissing prairie wind.
You’ve been here ten years today, and I wonder
why your side of the headstone is sinking
into the ground, as if someone comes here
every night and sits awhile. Years ago

I would curl onto the worn end
of that sofa you called “dusty pink”
—you at the upright grand—
as much to study your face
(softened into a version
I remember only in profile)
as to listen to the music you made,
the old songs you sang—“All by Myself,”
“Somebody Loves Me, I Wonder Who.”

As if she knew it’s what you couldn’t say
that made you sing, the woman with rosebud cheeks
smiled out of a heart-shaped porthole
on the Irving Berlin cover, her face like yours
in the tiny oval picture next to Dad’s.
Each time I come here, Mother, your plot seems smaller.
I remember fewer words from the songs
you wrapped around my shoulders like some fancy lady’s
  blue fox.
All the stops are open now. The wind is tuneless.

Ghostmother

Her body in and out of sight
like a piece of cellophane

catching the light
then not catching the light

thin like that,
see-through

Nights when
she visits me

I reach out to place
my hand on her shoulder

see it there
but touch nothing.

Her eyes ask, Love?
a question I can’t hear.

No, I tell the truth.
The cellophane undulates

stare to wary stare. No,
not then. But now—

Her mouth wavers
towards a smile

sure and unsure
there not there

Legacy

“A waterfall desk, late eighteenth,
lovely in its way,” the designer says.
“But out of place in your foyer.”
And my husband shakes his head

as if antiques were bogus claims to grandeur
like Mother’s silver—cradled in flannel
and chronicled for me like honorable ancestors:
two Regency salt spoons, one Charter Oak ladle,
  eight King Richard lemon forks.

“Something to pass on,” she’d whisper
to my father at the register.
“Something Baroque!” As if anything Baroque
might magically connect El Reno, Oklahoma,

to Newport, R.I., and the life of Mrs. Riley.
But something in those terraces
of shallow drawers was what I wanted:
a letter of passion from anyone to anyone;

a sepia photo, a splendid woman of dubious
character, the aunt I was never told about,
whose smile was my own. I tell my husband
it has to do with possibilities

but don’t say whose. I tell him what counts
are all those complications, surfaces
aswirl with broken curves,
the turmoil in the grain,
the eyes in the veneer.