April’s Graveyard

My thoughts flee toward the margins.
Chasing after them is one kind of start.
                                    Another is burrowing
deeper into the bewilderment.
As on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
The girl I was at fourteen in a borrowed
black, tight-fitting skirt who flirted
outside the graveyard gates
with the boy on a bike. Thinking of him
at the graveside.
                                    All these years later
something remains, unformulated.
A speechless undertow
of the loneliness that washes through me.

*

Childhood

In the back garden, diagonals
of late afternoon light. A few yard tools rest
against the fence. My father is cleaning the blade
of a hoe. He is probably whistling.
I think about my father all the time.
In part from a need like the pull to unravel
a recurring dream. In part because he was my father.
But now it is dusk. Under their tent of branches
the doves ask a question again and again.
Their patience is infinite. Below the silvering sky
the light is the color of an old coin.

*

Ladybugs

Not yet full spring. Mistrust among the tulip bulbs.
The girl pedals furiously, nevertheless.
Flight from childhood? A memory.
“Don’t be in such a rush to grow up, dear,” my father said.
We were in the grove of redwoods when I saw them.
Billions of them. Inches thick along the dark limbs.
The startling intimacy of the small bodies
one atop the other.

*

Beauty

                  —”is the subject of art,”
says Agnes Martin.

My mother wanted to be the child.
Wanted her beautiful future.
Wanted her infants who didn’t live.

I wanted to be the child.
Wanted the reddening leaves.
Wanted to burrow under the canopy of branches.

                  *

At opposite ends of a sandbox: two children
engaged in parallel play.

One with a bucket of water.
Building a castle. Filling a moat.

The other digging holes with a shovel.
Hunting for the delicate bones.

*

Early Memory

The doves summon me into the day.
I call back through the half-opened window.
The sunlight, too, is reaching for me
through the bars of the crib. Then my mother is there
in the way that the room is. Lifted and held, I understand
while the foghorns moan on the San Francisco Bay
that my mother needs to believe she is adored.
More than the doves. More than the sunlight.
Good girl that I am, I press my head
against her breast. Now look at the boat
of her dying, rocking softly
on the water.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/