Kathleen Vibbert

Insert

She wantS to make a vest
lined in green lace.
One pocket

is already laid out,
a tease of a square
with a full lining.

But the collar collapses
like a paper bag without breath,
and I plead for another pocket
for her small thin veins,
because when the fists want to open
slowly, the hands need to know they can
return home.

To take every shade of blue,
allow it to simmer inside
while trees laugh for hours
is to know life in its purest form.
There’s no end of the world,
only sunrise over pine straw. A time
when you haven’t yet learned
how to be invisible.

2/2010

All thoughts my own, unless credit given the author.

Most ears are deaf, most eyes blind, and many voices catch in the throat but an open heart brings us all to our senses.

I have a million things to do but I shouldn’t be worried. I’m sure I’ve done a million things in my life already.

One dot is a goal. One dot is the solution to reach that goal. Why do I keep using invisible ink to connect these two dots?

If our body is our “home” as the old song says, then I wonder if being homeless is the same thing as having an out of body experience.

Everything is easier when youth is on your side. When you’re close to 60, you could find someone young to accompany you, but it’s not the same feeling.

If your Plan B doesn’t work, You may have to go to Plan C,even D and you may need a plan E–but if you have to go to PlanF, then you’ve probably failed

Relationships are like thighs. They start out smooth, then they get a little lumpy, but without them you don’t have a leg to stand on. “Sylvia Fine”

I laugh, I love, I hope, I try, I hurt, I need, I fear, I cry. And I know you do the same things too, So we’re really not that different, me and you.” “Colin Raye”

When my granddaughter and husband get together, they sound like two dolphins catching up on sea gossip!

Forty years I have been driving an automobile. Was that the wilderness? Because I really have not gone far from where I first begun.

2010 has proven to be a quiet year for me so far. OVS is out and the publication is very nice. I’m very pleased to be part of it. With my son serving in Afghanistan,
writing seems to be something I can’t focus on as much as I did a few months ago.
But I’m sure I will find a purpose to it soon. I’ve become very much more politically minded of late. Glued to the TV. My granddaughter is of course, the light of my life right now. Other things going on. Every year I try to discover a new poet, someone I can sink my heart and soul into. While in Hawaii a couple years ago, I discovered
Wistawa Szymborska and purchased everything she ever wrote. It’s funny how you just find work like that when thousands of miles from home and not even expecting it.

The year will be a good one for me if my vision remains stable or improves and of course, I will welcome both. I’m sure the writing will come back full force. I never know what will spark a thought, a poem or a work. Ever. But I’ve learned over the years that it just can’t be forced. Like so much in life. The flow has to be there.

A New Year causes me to reflect. I don’t do the whole resolutions thing; I never have. I was thinking about how I haven’t written anything for a few months and how personal issues have clouded my mind, overwhelming.
I came across this verse that lifted me up, that gave me such a new joy and perspective. Maybe I was thinking of my first collection of poetry “Past the River” and now, I read this and I think, you never truly get past a river which held such great love, and gave such a cleansing joy.

Song Of Solomon 8:7 – Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned.

OVS Magazine, Fall, 2009, also
in their Anthology, 2010.


Chickenpinata,
a journal of poetry,
Issue Four, October, 2009.

I received my copy today of MEOW Poetry, by Editor Jeffrey Winke. I’m very pleased to be surrounded by such a fine group of writers. It’s a very nice publication.

Available at amazon.com

I came across a poem by a very accomplished
poet, Brian Culhane, entilted “Library”
Printed online from The King’s Question,
(graywolf press) and while I don’t print other
writer’s work without their permission I just
wanted to say how much the poem affected me.

In the opening stanza he mentions his father
putting the books into stacks. I immediately
thought of Henry Bemis from an old episode
of The Twilight Zone. My favorite episode.
Why? Because its focal point is “time” and
how we have such a finite view of it. There was
Burgess Meredith running up and down
steps of a library that had all but been destroyed,
attempting to rebuild his own private aisle.
He had all the time in the world. To read.
Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, science, art.
Until his glasses broke.

My life is filled with libraries and the meaning
of them in my life has been an underlying
influence as well as a means of strength,
as far back as when I was
five years old and we lived behind one.

The poem is poignant. But its ending
haunts me as I read about the “job”
being over and the years he has left to mourn.
I can take those last lines and wrap them
around me in a variety of ways.

I cherish this poem. My last library I left
when I left the job at age 49.
It was a devastating
time in my life as well as cathersic.

Many people do mourn for years.
Not days, or weeks or even months,
but years. I don’t think it should be that way.

The eerie way the Henry Bemis episode
was fulfilled in my life few would believe.
The physical library I worked in does not
exist at present. The building gone and the books
as well. Then, my vision going awry for years
I could hardly read anything, let alone
stack a book. Now, I can. Now I only mourn
in part that time in my life. I’d rather
remember as Culhane mentions love withheld,
and spread my thoughts over those cobbled
rows behind Trement Street where the books
were all at elbow level and I ran barefoot.
Summer days, index cards, puppet shows.
Nothing to mourn and everything to read.
And as Henry said “there’s time now”

My thanks to Brian Culhane for this poem.

A man once spoke the way a yellow sky rolls back.
Often our laughter would echo,
pull us along
into rows we needed to walk through
as if the journey could somehow surpass our steps:
We walked past white houses, 
retaining walls, windows with azure curtains
 and deep cherry wood sills. Books opened 
during October, yellowed, never read,

All the possibilities that once felt like gnarled 
shoulders began to embrace us. 
His palms now wrinkled from prayers, once responded to mine. 
Perhaps he walks an island, shanked against the green, 
where even the sun is unable to open his arthritic hands, unaware that he
still wanders through me, though silent on cloudy days,
crust of his beard, a shadow overcast.

KATHLEEN VIBBERT 2009