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DARLING Sweet face
Eyes down like crescent slivers Of negative moon on a dusty sky You are shapes and you are shades And you are traces of things not found Elsewhere in life Shadows not cast by form And dreams not hinged on sleep Your thoughts are weighted by stones To the bottoms of pools Out of the way of eyes And safe from dragons But treasures To little fish like me -Heather K. Dooley 23 March 1999 |
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I gather up my butterflies... I gather up my butterflies
into my fist and shove them in my notebook half-wings fluttering and sweaty and I slam the cover on them but they don't cry they just settle their wings and tuck their imaginary heads like gray doves in the snow and I love them so much but I don't let them know -Heather K. Dooley 27 January 1999 |
Structure My drafts and their devices
They remind me of plants with chlorophyll veins like the veins in babies' wrists if babies were light green like infant aliens with skin like the stems of Touch-Me-Nots she says Your poems are really poems and mine are just like thoughts but she's writing amoebas in her car with her daughter and her bumperstickers, she writes I love and like love, I am here and like here, I want to leave and she comes and goes like a tide of ocean with no structure and no veins -Heather K. Dooley 16 February 1999 |
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SUGAR PILL
From truck stops in the middle of the cold night She thinks of pouring sugar down her throat before bedtime Ruby-throated good night girl Tiny script like her grandmother's Parlor rugs, Satin pillows, This sugary glass, And all these rooms like canaries - Not yellow, but *lucid.* Whispering through the house The door that never completely closes Her darling is off somewhere in love A mystery to her She smiles, shakes her head All this love (and gasoline) It's enough to take you places. She trips on the rug Knows what she's never quite said Writing before bed In a hard-backed book Printed with bugs and butterflies (It's what girls think is pretty these days.) She listens at a door To one asleep Alone in a narrow box She always stops too soon How good it would be to speak again A smile and a lifting of the chin Forward through the rooms. ~~(c) Heather K. Dooley 13 November 1999 THE HARP Is there a side of her lovely face That she thinks is better than the other? It doesn't matter - people are round; If I played the harp. . . If you didn't, what would you do? I don't play the harp. What do you do? I - Listen, I dance in the hollows, In the storms when the rain comes and scares me Then it says, "It's only me." The rain *says* that to you? My mom taught me; I'm not ashamed. Then in the barn the horses chew the hay And the light shines out; It's just like home. But you don't play the harp? No, I don't play the harp But some people do, And that's important to me. ~~(c) Heather K. Dooley 17 October 1999 |
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OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL People wander onto stage
Like dry leaves And say their parts And wonder on their way. Yes, God, I listened I will be here at the close of day. ~~c Heather K. Dooley 02 December 1999 |
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