E. Louise Beach
CAMPFIRE AT LAKE MICHIGAN
We built it from driftwood,
toasting our faces, the older
folks talking in drowsy voices,
while I poked a stick,
saw it char in the coals.
Flames crackled like popcorn,
like oil in a pan,
like my BB gun maiming
an old tin can. Brilliant
impermanence in the sand,
the blaze fell to embers
and set like the day
as the great lake lay quietly
throbbing.
FIRST FRUIT
Woman wants
what her heart hears--
tree rustle, a flutter,
summer in the orchard--
and bites into flesh,
an hour's sweetness, bloom-
dusted scion. The Sky
is fire.
Mouth awry (a bitter
spitter), skin mottled
with flyspeck
and sooty blotch,
Eve treks
past autumn fruit--
fall, weight bent, down
a wilderness.
I WISH TO MAKE A POEM
with Monongahela in it--
a name so primal one can hear
the honeyed water when
reading beside it of a Sunday,
or flicking flies in a tributary
for reticent trout.
Or when apprehending,
at day's pink window,
the Great Blue Heron--
wakeful, frozen - a tugboat
churning, and thin towns
thinning, passing down.
Not having seen this mellifluous
river, flowing north
toward Pittsburgh,
I must imagine its limbless
current, its liquid rhythm
from a word.
E. Louise Beach
Dr. Beach is a teacher of languages and literature. Her first chapbook of poems, Blue Skies, will be published by Finishing Line Press in December 2006. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Big City Lit, The Bitter Oleander, descant, Ellipsis, Poem, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere.
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