Sample Poems by Veronica Patterson

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To Tell a Story

You start to tell a story.
It's about your daughter or your begonia
or your cat. How it died or you thought it might die
or it didn't die but you know it will
and knowing weighs you down
but lifts it up, the cat or the begonia,
which is beginning to bloom, or the daughter,
who is also, into a light so bright you can't see
and your tongue dries
and all the words trail off
into radiance.

Then your neighbor walks in. He thinks
it's his geranium you're speaking of,
the green spice on his fingers
from breaking off even a dead leaf
and the hairs of his dog-
but you insist it's your cat you're talking about-
stick to the fingers and smell like begonias
or like your daughter just come in
from cutting lilacs in the yard, and you despair
over begonias, geraniums, all the blooming
daughters.

Then you recall a gardenia
browning at the edges
of your first dance and suddenly you think
life is like that, browning at the edges
before you realize
you talk begonia
and he listens geranium
and you're both wrong, but quiet
in a silence browning at the edges
when you start
to tell a story.

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Perseids

I convinced my two daughters
to come out and watch
for meteors because

growing up, I lay in sultry
August dark, looking
for some swift light, some promise

to punctuate the days. On the porch
we leaned back in chairs,
singing half or less of old songs,

crooning into the blue-black
that licked our citronella candle's
lozenge of light. Sometimes

we only knew the chorus. Feet
on the stone railing,
tipped almost past balance,

the year, everything ripe
to shift. How could we know
when? Not that the moment

stood for anything exactly
- separate, particular -
but that it stayed with me

when the rest of the year-
all the events-
faded.

---

Driving Back from the Wellness Clinic Before Dawn
?inter- + secare to cut, more at SAW-

Intersection, a truck just misses us-the driver
never sees

I see the narrow gap,
disturbed spring air.

At home I take supplements
for heart, bones,

memory. And enter the next
hour. The next hour, slowly

wedging open. The next hour,
which opens! The sun

comes up. The day remains
supple. What had I been

saying? Was it I love you?
How easily nothing

happens. A tiny draft
from a slit

in space and time,
a sudden curiosity

about the shared root
of oblivious and oblivion.

---

Cloudy

A poem makes choices-for example, to speak of clouds or death.
The poem prefers clouds. The poet prefers clouds, the way
they suggest palaces and full sails. Then clouds let a climbing light
descend, Jacob's Ladder, and with it, thoughts of

angels and wrestling. Clouds throw a shadow in front of a woman
walking west, where vapor twines around mountain peaks like hair
caught in a brush. And she can't forget clouds in leaving-light:
fuchsia, coral, dusty pink. But it was morning when death

arrived-an infant-named, not yet known. There was, as is said
of some disasters, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky, though even a poem
knows better than to assume anything about loss or weather. No
cloud in the sky limited by her window,

just the hospital's shocking brick corner. Something shocking.
Lying still, she knows clouds are unruly, yet death had towered
fast and secretly, cloud by cloud, one of them fleecy as an infant's
stuffed lamb lying wide-eyed on a small sheet

in a small room beneath a mobile of clouds slowly turning.