inside her coat."Too bitter for him. I sent my
husband
home for the Volvo." We wait
on the corner
of Kit Carson Rd. as clouds quilt
earth
and one small dog seeks solace
inside a womb of down.
BIBLICAL FOG
Joe
Lynch (1926-2008)
Two months after
your death, a swathe
of fog over the neighbor's
field reminds me
of Moses's hair.
Fiercely white, shimmering,
offering a direct line to God
whose thunderous voice
reminds me of your Irish tirades
that sent us kids scurrying
to our shared beds or the prickly
woods behind Center Square Green
where our unskipped stones
created rock graves on the silty
bottom of Neshaminy Creek.
Those days, I tried so hard to be
good:
report card A's, rosary beads clacked
hard, Hoover wheeled out for every
Saltine crumb, heavy trashcans
hauled down to the curb.
Succeeded too well.
Too bad, both you
and I would
have preferred
a real renegade.
Someone who spurned
Moses's hair, preferring
to hack her way up
briar-clogged, gnat-whirled
Skunk Mountain.
Doris Lynch's work appears in Bitter Oleander,
Commonweal, and Tattoo Highway.New
work is forthcoming in Adirondack Review and Xanadu.Her chapbook, Praising
Invisible Birds, appeared from Finishing
Line Press in November 2008. The Indiana Arts Commission has awarded her three
individual artist's grants: two for poetry and one for fiction.She works as a reference librarian.
