Sherryl Robbins
Starting from Sandia 12
after Whitman
I have walked in
and heard the mockingbird
sing
like the robin
the cardinal
the chickadee
sing
like a phone ringing
a boy bouncing his basketball in the driveway
the ice cream truck
sing
like a thunder cloud
like a mullet jumping
sing like the moon, mouth wide open
sing the she-bird to its nest
warn other birds away
sing
to confuse all sense of direction
sing to the dead
and to birds
still in the egg.
The Chase – First Day
Water breaks
and there she blows
gently down the stream.
Alone again
as when a girl
but lulled by internal bowers
never visited.
Jungle greens
and hot pinks
pulsing drawing
me in in in
in the boat
of my body
in a gently tightening spiral
to the spring
the heart of light
and darkness
to meet the inconceivable
her/not her
conceived there
and pushing out
in the opposite
direction double helix
spinning up a whirlpool
of interior
compulsion
with the first
dull hints of pain
gnawing at the
outer edges
of this direful zone.
And birds, birds
wheeling just above
the bend as warning
just before
the grand god
reveals herself
and bites the boat
in two.
Sherry Robbins is a poet and teaching artist. She has conducted creative writing workshops throughout New York State and abroad since 1977 and was named the New York State Teaching Artist of the Year for 2005. She is currently an arts-in-education consultant for the University of Coimbra in Portugal and for Portugal’s Belgais Center for the Study of Arts. As the owner of Orchard Press and co-owner of Weird Sisters Press, Sherry printed letter press works of poetry for her own and for other small presses.
Sherry has two chapbooks of poetry, Snapshots of Paradise and Or, the Whale, as well as the complete edition of Or, the Whale recently published by Blazevox books, and dozens of poems published in literary journals and anthologies here and in Spain and Portugal, including Earth’s Daughters, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly and Poets at Work.
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