Heartwood

For the woman with a blanket covering her face,
parked in the hallway of the nursing home.

When she was young she used to know
the Latin name for mistletoe;
loved both the bloom, the chestnut bur,
the grackle's caw, the cricket's chirr,
the sun, the storm, the afterglow.

And still the seasons come and go,
the Pyrus in her orchard grow
another ring, another spur.
When she was young

she tended them. Then came the snow.
Now in a frail voice, tremolo,
she whispers "pear" as if it were
ineffable as petrichor,
as time tilts back to long ago
when she was young.

Catherine Chandler is an American poet and translator. She is the author of Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), This Sweet Order: A Book of Sonnets (White Violet Press, 2012), and two chapbooks, All or Nothing (2010) and For No Good Reason (2008). She is co-editor of Passages: A Collection of Poems by the Greenwood Poets (Greenwood Centre for Living History, 2010). She has been a winner of The Lyric Quarterly Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (2010, as well as finalist in 2008 and 2009), and finalist for the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, the Able Muse Write Prize, and the Best of the Net anthology. Her poems, essays, podcasts and translations have appeared in many journals in print and online, including Measure, Orbis, Candelabrum, Iambs and Trochees, Alabama Literary Review, The Raintown Review, The Flea, Mezzo Cammin, String Poet, Angle, and in anthologies, including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, The Book of Hopes and Dreams, Best of The Barefoot Muse, Cradle Songs, and The Able Muse Anthology. Catherine Chandler currently lives in Canada and is now retired after lecturing in Spanish at McGill University’s Department of Languages and Translation for many years.