Two Poems by Judith Sornberger

What Is Essential

I fell for him even before he called me
his flower the first time we made love.
But how little we knew of each other
when we married at eighteen. Not long after,
I learned he didn’t believe in squandering
our earnings—mine from the accounting
job I hated, his from the mattress factory—
on anything inessential.

Our second February, someone at work
was selling five-dollar daffodil
bouquets for the Heart Association.
Without asking his permission, I bought one,
and all the way home I hardly noticed
the black slush I trudged through
for the brightness I carried. Sprinting
up the steps to our tiny apartment,
I hoped the tight buds, as they opened,
might melt what had frozen between us
that ice-bound winter. Silly, I suppose,
as splurging on something so unnecessary.

The next morning, we awoke to a wide swathe
of sunlight spread across the kitchen table
and one brave bud splayed open. Given his
disapproval, my husband refused to see
how the frilly gold center resembled
a gramophone speaker—the kind of contraption
I imagined always playing love songs.
All day, into the elegiac light of late afternoon,
it broadcasted the scent of an awakening,
the blaring silence of an ending.

*

The Return of the Upside-down Bird

I lay myself out on the chaise longue,
inviting sunshine to ease my shoulders.
My treat this first warm day is reading outside,
but the pain in my crumbling right knee
Shrieks so loudly I can’t concentrate.
Deep sigh. Close your eyes.

When we first moved here, I loved how the woods
kept creeping ever closer to the deck. Pines, juniper,
and honeysuckle still approach, but the ashes
are a dead and dying tribe, stumbling down,
one by one, like so many I’ve loved.

Any day one may crash through the roof.
But damn, I didn’t come out here to muse
on one more thing falling apart. Opening again,
my eyes flit to the petite red-breasted nuthatch
I’ve watched for all winter among the birds
braving the hawk’s keen eye to partake
at my feeder. The one my long-dead love
called the upside-down bird.

Who knows how it survived the winter?
But here it is, spiraling, head first,
down the dead trunk, pecking at insects
in the shredding bark. And in the next second—
I can hardly believe it—another appears
on the trunk next door. Maybe its mate?
Maybe they’re grateful for the death
that so abundantly feeds them. Maybe
they’ll weave a nest from its peeling strands,
lay a handful of hope for the rest of us.

*

Judith Sornberger’s most recent poetry collection is The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). Her full-length poetry collections are I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), Practicing the World (Shanti Arts), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five other chapbooks, including the award-winning Wal-Mart Orchid. Sornberger is professor emerita of Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and, many years ago, created the Women’s Studies Program. She is involved in community theater in Wellsboro, PA—producing, writing, and acting regularly in productions. Living on the side of a mountain in the northernmost tier of the Appalachians is a constant source of inspiration for her. www.judithsornberger.net