Marion Boyer
Marion Starling Boyer is a professor emerita of Communication and has published three full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her book, Ice Hours (2023), won University of Michigan’s Wheelbarrow Prize and was named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. She has won Grayson Books Chapbook competition twice, in 2023 for What Word for this and in 2014 for Composing the Rain. Boyer lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, and leads workshops for Lit Cleveland and to support Friends of the Roethke Foundation. For more see www.marionstarlingboyer.com
and that’s us, there
It’s not mine, this snapshot of veiled mountains
and soft yellow trees sending long shadows
toward a grey lake, but I keep the photo
because of the little island that’s in
the middle, large enough for two tall pines,
no space for more. The year before we met
I toured Europe with a class. Rode jets –
Madrid to Rome, Paris, home – giddy times,
though when I saw the Alps in Switzerland
I wept. This photo is not from my trip
but I recognize these two trees which grip
the diminishing ground. You understand –
they’re us. But see all around, how we’re framed
in beauty, with no reason to complain.
And I say I’ve no reason to complain
because the daily news from far away
shows suffering too brutal for clichés
and we feel helpless in the face of pain
others must endure while we walk the dog,
chat with friends, and watch this autumn’s cascade
of wine-lipped leaves and the goldfinches trade
bright for drab. A woodpecker’s monologue
draws you from your chair. This is what I know:
you’re forgetting things. Not just misplaced keys –
how to gas up the car. Your expertise
for racing is gone, but not that gusto
for rumbling engine sounds. I am okay
if I live only in the present day.
And don’t we all just live inside each day?
Our neighbor welcomed a teen to her home
who came from Guatemala with her grown
brother and three other men. They had made
their home in a garage. She is a girl
with no English. Now, neighbors bring clothes, shoes.
She attends eighth grade. Picture how confused
her days – strange people, strange language, a whirl
of new. My widowed neighbor lived alone
and now has this girl, no telling how long,
so they share beans at breakfast and belong
bravely to each other and I am prone
to see they, too, are these pines standing in
the lake sheltered by this range of mountains.
In the High Thin Branches
A squirrel is splooting on the porch
railing, limbs dangling, all played out,
like you. Yes, the news is filled
with fire and floods and falsehoods
and this morning a robin struck
the window and fell, stunned.
So many invisible panes.
But look—there’s your husband
throwing a frisbee for the dog
and the hibiscus you saved indoors
all winter is finally unfurling a bud
like an umbrella. So gather yourself.
You’re no different. Everyone
every day, leaps from twig to twig.
Without knowing, I’d waited all my life
I’m seventy-three in new open-toe heels
that strap around my ankles, ankles I’d broken
years ago, on separate occasions, acting silly.
I’ve flown to the mile-high city where my niece
is a white calla, gleaming, as her new husband dances her
into the center of us all. She is a woman and child
and infant and bride and I, too, am woman and child
when her father leads me to the floor. He is my brother,
my only sibling. His joy is something silver plunging
from a high cliff, a clean piercing. And when the music
lets go, he moves me into a twirl and back and then another,
and another until I am bursting and breathless
and only after the next day’s predawn taxi, the confusion
of the airport, the drive home in darkness, will I realize
I have never, ever danced like that.
