Untitled Document
lakepoems cluster #13
a full moon rising
on the
pond casts
black moon shadows
my oars drip golden
the lakes’ waves
feeling out our
shore
unlike steady sea surf
slosh and splosh juicily
among the
rocks
the leg span of
a wolf spider
sidling up between
the
dock boards
is wide as my palm
I step around her
gingerly
a
mottled green frog
has chosen to sit in the
sunshine behind
the
jagged rock so that
the waves that smash
against it bathe
her
only in a rainbow spray
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
The British writer Virginia Woolf wrote about the
pleasures of having a room of one’s own. Here the Vermont poet Karin
Gottshall shows us her own sort of private place.
The Raspberry Room
It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.
It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like
fists in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying so hard to love this world — real rooms too big
and full of worry to comfortably inhabit — but believing
I was born
to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry
patch in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard. I
was cross- stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s
needles. The effort of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong. Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood made it mine — the adventure of that red sting
singing down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:
just space enough for a girl to lie down.
Copyright © 2007 by Karin Gottshall. Reprinted
from Crocus, by Karin Gottshall (Fordham University Press, 2007). American
Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation
(www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
