Poems

Poems from Asylum

Obituary #1

May 21, 1986. Truman Willard Cottom, after a long illness, died trailing the perfume of a hundred women, including his two daughters.

Melancholia

Child-deer, mute to the world,

pillowed in grasses by day,

leaping in night's blue fields.

Veiled from the clatter of lights

and sights of the hunter's rifle.

The moon, a psalm,

the heavens blinking their white

tails in woods far away.

Bark, hazelnuts, budding

willow. Loneliness flecked

with sleep. Forest aflame,

you enter the highway that cleaves

branches and streams, wildered

by the hum of human endeavor.

You paw the night, keen the loss

of your fawn's faint heart.

Poems about Fiji

(from a work in progress)

Water-borne

(published in Bronze Bird Review)

As night unveils Venus and Alpha Centauri,

the ferry inches south, twelve miles distant,

rocking as though the ocean's open palm.

Below, a water goddess lifts angelfish,

olive turtles, island and cays.

I, who cannot resist

the undertow, swam the Pacific near San

Clemente--saint of sailors--and Santa

Monica (revered for her tears); at Rose Island,

dove to a jewel box of fish. Waves

to the ocean floor, I touch the feet

of the goddess, pregnant with sand and salt,

she who buoys with her deep-dyed swelling,

this lofting mother's belly.

                                                    A World Away

In March of 2005--autumn in the southern hemisphere--we moved into a one-room, ten-sided house in Fiji that looked out at the Pacific across a valley lush with vaivai and voivoi trees. The water was teal and shallow near the beach. Waves lapped the shore twice a day, tumbling lava rocks amid layers of light. Men walked down the dirt road by our house and up the hillsides to their plantings of taro, kava, and cassava. Their voices echoed in the trees as did the pings and clicks of flying fox bats that swooped around our house in late afternoon. The Fijians' greetings--bula! bula!--lingered in the fronds of coconut palms and in hibiscus blooms along the road, comforting us as a braided life.

Offered here are sample poems from Caroline Cottom's poetry collection, Asylum (Main Street Rag), and from a manuscript of poems in progress called Passage to Fiji.

Reelfoot Lake, West Tennessee

Our house in Fiji

They Nod to Me

(published in Last Stanza Poetry Journal)

I had not imagined mud dauber wasps,

musk-breasted parrots, or a goshawk

speaking to me, although in Tennessee,

a bluejay with broken wing had hopped

onto our porch, asking for help.

The jay allowed us to lift it into a box

to be carried to a rescue center for mending.

On a visit to New Zealand from Fiji,

we heard of a small bird—a fantail—

friendly with humans. I met one

fluttering on a woodsy trail, stopped,

held out a stick, and the fantail hopped on.

As the Fiji years swept through, I heard

voices of a tiny spider, a ghost owl,

and the islands themselves.

Steeped in the forest, Emerson wrote,

I am not alone and unacknowledged.

They nod to me, and I to them.

They were there all along, weren’t they?

Weren’t they.

Cyprus, Left Standing

My mother loved this lake,

its shallows and throngs

of snowy egrets--Reelfoot

Lake, the compass

my ancestors called home.

I imagine a girlhood:

family outings--sweet corn,

fried chicken, red-checked cloths

--but the images flicker

in black and white.

After earthquakes

and Mississippi floods created

the lake, loggers felled every tree

whose roots were under water.

Cypresses still standing

seem to whisper, foxes

and red-winged blackbirds

call out my name.

I kneel by my mother's grave,

feel her on the banks,

in the fields, hear her in the muted

wing beats of a great blue heron

as egrets fill the trees

with blossoms of lace.