Messages
She thinks the chapel service in her retirement home
is only for the Presbyterians, which can’t be true
since the home is run by the Episcopal Church,
but I decide not to ask what she means,
since she isn’t Episcopalian either.
She doesn’t want to go.
We go to a concert in a Presbyterian church
that burned 150 years ago and was rebuilt.
In the drafty space amid peeling paint
and dusty ceiling fans, the musicians
spin infinite loops and sing
about consistency and self-control.
A white dove perched at the top
of the largest organ pipe, the only item
to survive the fire, offers its own message:
Denomination means little next to love.
Have you been hospitable to angels?
They may be closer than you think.
*
Traces
It’s difficult to live in a jumbled house,
a body whose mind has lost its ability
to find what it’s looking for.
A forest of lilacs marks a place where people
once homesteaded and planted these shrubs
that spread underground into a thicket of beauty.
Each grain of ‘star sand’ on a beach, skeletal remains
of a 500-million-year-old marine organism
that brings the past into the present underfoot.
Fog prickles my nose like seltzer water,
fingers its way through my dog’s curly fur
to her scent memories of a close-range coyote.
Webs of molecules link brain cells
like garden trellises that past events cling to,
until they start to splinter and finally tumble down.
*
Meg Freer works in the arts in Ontario. Her prose, poetry, and photos have appeared in many journals, and in four chapbooks. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press and a contributing editor for Traces Journal. A full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from DarkWinter Press.
