Four Poems by Laurel Brett

THE BAY AT BAR HARBOR

A life of never sleeping—
insomnia makes living
a disease.

I take up residence
on the balcony of the hotel,
glass doors only mute

sleeping sounds of breaths
rising and falling, the benedictions
of my family, oblivious to the night

I spend sitting on the chair buried
in the bowl of stars,
the bay breathing

in the darkness, too.
Silver begins
along the crevices of dawn

opening the curtain
to a hundred tiny islands,
mirrors of the firmament

shining in the curve of port,
a school of swimming fish,
flashing fins— birth of the morning

of the world. I can never explain
to the sleepers the vision
before me,

or my wild exuberance.
By the time they wake
the silver will have vanished.

*

MIMOSAS AND MILKWEED

How can you not adore the earth?
To love is to press your cheek against the ground
and lie on your back to gaze up
through mimosa flowers
becoming birds against the sky.

The milkweed I planted for monarchs
returned this year, and bloomed
pink as a surprise— a prayer against extinction.

*

DEATH CAN NOT CLAIM DAHLIAS

I’d been mourning dahlias—
another loss.

You, my gardener gone—
poison ivy an invading army.

Dahlias demand so much—
tubers dug up in autumn

stored in winter       replanted in spring.
JoAnn gives me a mason jar

of dahlias. One owns my heart—
the color of midnight

if midnight were maroon       the texture of joy
if ecstasy were velvet.

Larger than my palm —
petals a portal.

*

IN MONTREAL

I get lost in the bonsai
in the Chinese garden
at Le Jardin Botanique

until I can no longer tell
if the trees are huge or tiny.
My restless children

beg to see Le Biodôme
nearby — four habitats
of North America.

We huddle in the cold, watching
puffins and penguins
in their fake Antarctica.

We swelter in the rainforest
room, where my 12 year old son
points out a capybara, a mammal

with a blunt brown snout. He
imitates Tim Curry voicing
an old cartoon, English accent

and all— a large amphibious rat,
and adds in a joyful voice
the largest rodent in the world.

Later at dinner the waiter,
insists my daughter is Italian.
Je suis américaine, she insists,

practicing her New Yorker’s glare.
They have outgrown my habitat.
The lady concierge explains in French

that whales will rise tomorrow,
their glistening sunlit backs
will leap up from the St. Lawrence.

*

Laurel Brett is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work has appeared in SECOND COMING, EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, ECLECTICA among other outlets. She lives overlooking a harbor.