The Charm
You hear the soft spooning of the rain
before you know it to be rain. Your mind
cannot quiet. You understand
how the cypress trees tormented Van Gogh
with their beauty even as he loved them,
while the sky above bled blue with a sharp
and willful clarity.
Some nights are spent numbering the dead
who still murmur and stir in the air around you.
Send them on their way, but leave the door
open. They may share their secrets
if you don’t seem too hungry. For some
solace comes when the trees turn
ashen pink with the flush of morning
and the ordinariness of starlings
brighten the dogwood with noisy
vicarious life. For you
it is hard excavation in a rocky field
where your words prove a blunt shovel.
Dig deep, lean in, the bitter root you unearth
will keep you like a charm.
The Cold April Sea
My daughter sends photos from Maine—
a white farm house near the sea appearing
magically on the computer screen–
wet, gleaming stones on a cove beach at low tide–
a bay on two sides of a peninsula plunging
into the cold April sea.
I peruse the strip of land via satellite image—
the coves, spruce wood, roads with quaint names
where she walks, bikes every day—a lucky escape
from our pandemic exile. I can almost breathe
her sea air, walk cautiously on the slippery cobbles,
look out into eternity while the morning fog
moves over the shoreline— God’s finger
blurring, then clearing the world as he looks down
like the distant satellite . . . and I am left with […]
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Spring ca.1922
Georgia O’Keeffe
written on request for the Frances Lehman-Loeb Art Gallery, Vassar College
We too are unable to contain ourselves
in the wild exultation
of this world that pulls us
into the clouded blue
like the tree already leaning
so far into the gold future
of autumn.
The eager thrust of spring
is barely restrained
in the green-purpled wave
burgeoning into
blue sky where even the clouds
reflect the force of green. […]
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Raphael Kosek’s latest book of poetry and short prose, Harmless Encounters, won the 2021 Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. American Mythology, a finalist at Brick Road Poetry Press, was released in 2019. Her poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals such as Southern Humanities Review and Poetry East, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and selected for the Writer’s Almanac. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate where she teaches at Dutchess Community College. www.raphaelkosek.com