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It was the year of tufted grasses. It was the year of questions. It was the year of fog over the vineyard. The year you started falling. A damaged year. It was the year of sails in the distance and knots here. It was the year without refuge. It was the year of bog orchids, early runoff, unaccountable swelling. It was the year of sweet peppers in August and patience, a year without diagnosis. It was the year of storms on both sides of the window, of your pain. It was a year without skin. A year of testing. It came without warning or instructions. It was the year of swallows caked under the bridge, of difficulty swallowing.
It was the year of small foxes, white pelicans, one brown pelican far from its coast. Outside, the war deepened but we coudn't turn our faces to it. It was a year of drought. It was a year without syntax or punctuation. It was the year of disarray. It was the year of mountains looking away, seeming to look away.
(First appeared in GSU Review.)
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Veronica Patterson's first book was How to Make a Terrarium (Cleveland State University, 1987). Her second book, Swan, What Shores? (New York University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award and won awards from the Colorado Center for the Book and Women Writing the West. She has also published a chapbook of prose poems called This Is the Strange Part (Pudding House Publications, 2002), and a book of poems and photographs with photographer Ronda Stone (Stone Graphics Press). Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Indiana Review, The Colorado Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Prairie Schooner, among many other publications. She lives in Loveland, Colorado.
Veronica will be reading in Fort Collins, Colorado, this Friday, April 18th, with Lisa Zimmerman, from Fort Collins, and the poet laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow. See calendar for details! |
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