POETRY MONDAY: November 5, 2012
Michelle Gillett
Our poet this month is Michelle Gillett, smiling as she holds her new granddaughter in her arms. It’s a pleasure to introduce Michelle and her poems to our readers – at least for those of us who have electrical or battery power – and to take a brief respite from our storm recovery efforts and from thinking (and worrying) about the election tomorrow. We do hope, however, that you REMEMBER TO VOTE and to REMIND YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE!
Michelle Gillett is the author, most recently, of a lovely collection, The Green Cottage, winner of the Ledge 2010 Poetry Chapbook competition. Her previous books were Blinding the Goldfinches, winner of the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize, and a chapbook, Rock and Spindle (Mad River Press). Her poems have been published in many literary magazines, and she has won poetry fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
A journalist, editor and workshop leader as well as a poet, she is a regular op ed columnist for The Berkshire Eagle, a daily newspaper published in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she and a partner run an editing and book development business.
The three poems below by Michelle Gillett are all as yet unpublished.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Robbing the Bees
Robbing the bees is a term keepers use for extracting honey from a hive.
Murmur of bees in goldenrod
beside the north field path, almost inaudible
like voices in the psychiatric hospital
where I worked years ago – the therapists’ doors
closed on the unsayable. Everyone listened
for holes to slip through. Lorna would lock herself
in the utility closet to have it out with her selves.
Bill could hear the squirrels chew.
Patients with day-night reversal whispered
in their rooms. Troubles swarmed
the edge of dreams like bees crowded
out of a hive. In the portrait in the foyer,
Freud’s eyes followed wherever you went
in the room. “If these walls could talk …”
a doctor said to me once, and if it were true –
they would wait until the doctors went home,
the receptionist locked her knitting in a drawer,
the night staff finished dispensing pills.”
Then the walls would start extracting
from plaster and studs, years of stored secrets,
seductions, truths, and talk all night
about why words fail, why so much gets lost.
The Sea-Turtle
A day so hot the water shimmied with heat.
Across the bay, our rented house
looked not shingled brown but gilded
suspended above the narrow stairs
leading to the beach. A few miles out,
you cut the engine. A mirage, you said, when I pointed
to a far-off shape. You tipped your hat
to shade your eyes. But it was paddling to us
steady as a second hand marking time. I squinted
through mid-day light, watching it come closer–
then she was unmistakable–brown fist-sized head,
beaked nose, mouth that seemed to smile.
She kept a little distance from our aluminum boat
as if unsure of what it was that held us
but followed in our wake to Lieutenant Island
where we cooled off in the shallows.
The sand stirred with fiddler crabs, minnows
traced our shadows. Tide-lulled, you drifted.
I floated on my back. Ponderous and weightless,
our bodies displaced the element that carried us.
What kinship lasts longest?
She came close enough for me to almost touch her–
barnacles specked her carapace.
She looked at me unblinking before she turned
and swam away. Life is lighter than anything I possess.
Blind Faith
The curled pages with raised dots,
bound in thick sheaves,
heavy-weight to hold the embossed marks,
Old Testament and New,
purchased years ago for the blind girl
who came to Bible study group
so she could take her turn
reading the verses, now lie
dusty on the shelf. These days
the good news comes across
the screen, keyboards instructing
fingertips, and God can speak
from the burning bush, Lazarus rise
from the dead on disks.
Like so much else we used to touch
to understand forgiveness
when miracles were commonplace
and blindness the best
metaphor for indifference,
what good is this relic now?
Once I played that game of trust–
bandana over my eyes, one hand
on the shoulder of the person in front,
the leader calling out in the dark:
up. down, root , rock
and we followed him–
a conga line of sightless hikers
imagining we could feel our way
to some higher vision
when we took our blindfolds off.