Christine Potter
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. She has recently had poems in Rattle, Rattle Poets Respond, Pictura, Grain, Cloudbank, The McNeese Review, ONE ART, SWIMM, and Does It Have Pockets. Her poetry has been featured on ABC Radio News. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her latest collection of poetry, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books. She lives in a very old house with her husband and a chonky cat in the Hudson Valley.
The Night Clouds
You can’t pray a lie—Huck Finn (Mark Twain)
Maybe we were born praying or maybe
we wake up that way, ascending from sleep
into each day and assuming someone
notices. My own life is probably made
out of light: even if it’s sometime between
two and three AM and the furniture in
my bedroom might as well be a quiet herd
of cattle. I usually sort it out fast: a flash
in the mirror is only passing headlights,
the air conditioning kicking on sounds like
steady rain and isn’t. My husband’s dream-
breath, dream-breath. The two triangles
of our cat’s ears as she raises her head in
the dim glow from the bathroom. It all
means here, home, says it’s not time to be
up, doing. Lord, I want to say something
and I want to go back to sleep. I realized
today that I don’t even know the color of
my own eyes: blue? Green? Hazel? And
I don’t want to lose this moment but I will,
just by telling you so. Right now it feels
like everywhere I have ever been is rolling
out behind me. I want to keep it all close
and I cannot. But outside, the night clouds
move slowly. They’re on their way somewhere
else, inhaling and exhaling like curtains at
an open window, full of tomorrow’s weather.
Living Memory
is this photo of my great-grandfather at a forge: a
blacksmith, face and apron smeared with soot, in
his dark, low-ceilinged shop. I never met him, but
imagine his son’s raspy voice in his throat. I breathe
that bitter smoke. Once, in Canterbury, I stroked
walls of a church even more ancient the Cathedral—
built by 580 AD, over an older Roman building.
I wanted to close my eyes and see someone pouring
water into its baptismal font, wanted to ask him
about the oldest thing he had ever touched. I think
the true answer would be that water, because it
had cycled so many times from earth to sky. Often
I remember things from before I was born. Maybe
we all do: the water that’s always been here, maybe
the back of a kitchen door in a beach cottage we’d
rented, with heights and ages of kids who grew up
there noted every year in June. Shoes found in old
chimneys, notes slipped into walls: just what you do.
Some people have to leave every day. And rain’s surely
coming tomorrow, time belting us all in for the ride.
