THE DARK ANGEL
A hand touches your bed
and down the street
a car skids into a giant oak.
This is not your child
lying in the white hospital
with a broken spine, closed
lungs, not this time,
but the dark angel hovers
singing prophecies,
a prowler waits
at the midnight door
your daughter opens,
your son falls asleep,
a lighted cigarette drops
from loosed fingers
imagination shrieks and howls
as the dark angel
flies into the distance
busying himself with floods,
fires, other calamities,
climbs a blue-bleached sky
filled with clouds,
sits at the flowery edge,
a random spit of Paradise,
the black ice cracks, wicks flicker.
lighted candles choke and die,
from time to time
the sigh of invisible wings
touches your arms,
your eyelids flutter.
startled, you wake wondering
why your thin dreams tremble.
©Anne Cope Wallace
Setting Psychological Boundaries: A Handbook for Women, Greenwood Publishers, 1997
A BURNING BARROW
In my quiet bed I lie,
lie for hours
while stars brood,
the moon aches,
my brain thunders
and the trees forget
their splendor,
rusty leaves dissolving
in cold fields.
I wheel a burning
barrow of ghosts
onto the lawn.
Ghosts, I burn
them nightly,
nightly, they
rise again
to whimper with
the wounded moon.
each breaking star.
©Anne Cope Wallace
Setting Psychological Boundaries: A Handbook for Women
AN OPEN LETTER – ANNIVERSARY 2007, 9/11
Give me back the day before
spaces grew between
the stars, a bitter
wind whistling through.
Give me back the breath
of rivers, seeds of streams
before the thorn
consumed the rose
Give me back the thirst
of seasons, hunger
of dry fields, the core of
shadowed hills holding fast.
Give me back the hour
of light, the day
before I knew you.
WOMAN AT THE WHEEL
I drive the wide sweet bend
of Parsonage Hill Road
passing the white frame church,
the corner graveyard
where early settlers, soldiers
of the Revolution lie sleeping,
then glide the river trail,
speeding south or west
with a spin of the wrist.
The road is crowned
yellow daisies, crimson
clover, purple vetch
and I am all powerful woman.
1 slip over bridges,
across wrinkled green oceans
grasping planets of ice
and stars in my fists
Wearing the peak of slow hills
on my shoulders, I see
beyond mountains, over thickets,
past dissolving horizons.
Twelve healthy dragons
breathe my blue fire.*
*According to mythology, if you are not afraid
of the dragons, they can’t harm you.
©Anne Cope Wallace
Setting Psychological Boundaries: A Handbook for Women
ABOVE NAUSET BAY
The sand beneath my sandaled feet
is shy, crumbling as I climb
narrow trails that weave
a random path through .
these eroded dunes.
Here ocean surges in, pouring
through a twist of Nauset Bay
to form blue-black inlets, glittering
like wings on cloudless nights.
Along cliff-high trails
bearberry grows in strange relief
as if each flower and each limb
were separate hands
and where the boughs forget
to bloom, the body mourns.
I can halt the seasons. I can.
I won’t grow old and if
I should, my bones will bloom
like roses, salt roses along the marsh.
When winter comes I’ll
be branched, dark limbed
across this sanded shore
where sea gulls wheel the bay
like willful boys.
ROADS FOLLOW ME
on this blue island
tracing my footprints
wherever I go.
They say I
have been here before,
wild violets leaving
a thin purple scent
along trails
April paves green.
Fields of scrubbed grass
smoother than tears
know my story
why I have come miles
to this cold island
from sand-clay roads
that spawned me.
Daffodils, slow bloomers
on small spaces, find me.
They nod, never asking
where home is
or why the road winds back,
leaving me a season behind.
Red-winged blackbirds
insistent after a long winter
call to me of love
or pride or yearning.
They wonder
where I will wander
when the path ends
without warning, when
dust from my shoes
still calls, run, run.
©Anne Cope Wallace
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