Nellie Hill
(USA)
The Moon Again
The fifth night in a row
the moon has broken free
of winter branches
and sits at the top of my window
a round face
looking in
And I look back into that face asking
for something of myself
although I realize what I see is
light bounced back
from rock
Then come nights of decrescendo
to the slivered portion
that rises barely noticed
and looks in upon–who cares?
as it hangs in the elm’s bare branches
no one’s looking
no one hears
An owl hoots in the fir
across the way
a tiny light reflected
in each eye
Surprise Seasons
(After Romare Beardon)
Cousins, ours, were rolling around in the grass
because it had been hot
though the sun hadn’t shone all day.
Old ladies went to bed early,
pleased with the chance.
It was hard to remember
that they’d been young,
the same people but different skin,
no wrinkles, no sun spots.
The chickens were upset
and laid no eggs for weeks and weeks–
not in this upside down time,
hot with no sun,
then suddenly wind and cold
with chilly light.
Our sweaters were packed away.
To get them we’d have to climb ladders
high into the attic.
There behind pictures
of grandfather and grandmother
were our sweaters,
some knit by grandmother,
some worn by grandfather
with deer heads and snowflakes
over the heart.
Memento Mori
Snow covers the hills
and the light blue light
grows colder as the days
shorten and whiten.
Only yesterday we waded
through languid hours to now:
brief days, nights long,
too much sleep.
I count the pearls
on the childhood bracelet,
each marks time from then
when each luminous bead seemed
like a page of the future.
Now the pearls reflect
the changing weather
and the yawn of light.
I tend the household,
I wipe the table clean.
Learning by Fire
Our house was on the farm
where all the animals were doing it
with whinnies and neighs, yowls
and low-slung moos and grunts
and the dogs rubbing up on our legs
but we knew even the youngest of us
knew it was the animals not us
no matter how the voices floated
from our parents’ bedroom
through the house like dreams.
She was screaming screaming
and that’s why the bogey man
lived under the bed; and he was
groaning groaning and we knew
oh how we knew that the witch
was watching him from the walls.
It was our hallway and our bedroom
where the ghosts lived,
not theirs with their sheets rustling
like songs of both the unborn
and the dead twined so as
to call us up out of our beds
in spite of the bogey man
in spite of the witch
we continued
walking in our sleep
until we were awake.

Limantour Beach
Above the water
on a raised wooden walkway
we walk into an aftermath of rain,
into the salt-soaked air.
Left home quickly, left birds
stomping on the rooftop,
raccoons chewing at the eaves.
Just off the beach seals swim
back and forth along the foamy shoreline.
Waves crease in rhythm, watery logs
float and clank upon the stones.
We smell the salt long before we’re there
and in that air walk to the seals’ resting place.
They lie in mass, hundreds, tranquil in the sun,
content within the scent around them–
fish bones and fur oil.
Within the smell of sea and seal
a memory comes backside of the woods
where the packrat village grew by the stream–
round houses made of sticks.
A lost watch was found there.
It and other shiny metal things
insulate the walls.
We climb the dunes to watch
and breathe the pungent cluster,
eat lunch, take off our clothes
and wade through waves
toward a piece of fishing boat or ship
while seals bark and move together
like a carpet about to fly.
Winter Horse
The air this autumn afternoon
is perfect, the neighborhood so quiet
that the few sounds feel
like open hands receiving light.
The jet, the dog, the trees shuffling
in the bright day.
What I want and what I have
so often conflict.
I have my lists, my to do
and my to get. I want the bluish bird
who lives in the tree next door
nestling in my hand.
And the neighbor’s puppy,
the size of a toy bear,
wriggling black and furry
in my palm.
A fly nuzzles the window
thinking it’s summer.
Tomorrow when autumn’s curtain
pulls across the glass,
the trees, the yard, the books along the wall
will fall in early darkness
into shadows of themselves,
into symbol. And I’ll notice
everything again.
A horse looks across the fence,
a horse looks at the mountains.
The Hunt
We comb the grasses,
those long summer grasses
long after summer has passed.
We stride over the fields
and along the riverbeds,
past the hickory trees
with their dried hickory smell,
and the low-growing yellow oaks
with their oakey leaves still fluttering.
Our boots and our gloves release
a leathery fullness, a leathery animal smell,
in the stilled days of late autumn, the stillness
of early winter. We pass the remaining birds
with their miserable bird cheeps,
exactly the crackling sound of the thin ice
that covers the grasses before sunrise.
And we take home this feeling
of the wildness between seasons
as if we’ve forgotten where we came from.
We walk into the sleepiness that comes with cold
and the quiet before and after.
No Change but Change
Each year the lake spreads beneath clouds
that arrive as always every noon if it’s a sunny day,
and the trees lean their dark green into the lake,
as if to bleed their color into the water’s depth
the way I tried to paint them those summer afternoons.
The boathouse now is falling in and the dogs of then are dead;
and my father and his buddy, Uncle Wing Walker,
who gave Earhart her flying license, they’re dead, too,
scattered into the lake, into the water’s quiet
that persists, even within its storms.
Over the years the green cloaked shores
remain the same, studded with hemlock and balsam,
fingers of birch, maple, oak, and pine; and in the mud
beneath the season’s frozen water buried leeches
wait for summer, for something to latch onto. And the fish
sleep below the ice, some caught like a photo in the ice itself:
pickerel with their little teeth, yellow-bellied sunfish,
perch with slithery stripes. When the birds have left,
their summer voices abandoned, I lie awake listening,
imitating the barking owl that once I heard for a week straight.
And each year was the summer of sweet corn
or the summer of blueberries, the summer of bare feet
on the worn wooden floors of the open house in the north
in those few good days of endless light;
and the day’s brief heat full of flies; and the cold, the empty cold
that arrives so soon up there beyond where anyone would want to live
unless they could wait and wait all winter long
for each brief summer as we waited for years
before we saw the moose swimming across the lake for lily tubers
or the paw prints of a black bear on our daily road to town.
The Air Was Stormy
The air was stormy, thunderous and loud
and nothing echoed back.
I stepped sideways across the lawn
avoiding rocks and dampness,
the dog’s bark, the bird’s cry from the tree.
I cleaned the house while birds stared in
as if they knew me, watching every move.
Then back outside, raking through the grass,
searching for the lost watch and ring,
all the while looking down so as not to see
the reflected hand–my own,
the scraps and seeds. Myself,
first inside the house, then out
Winter Dusk
A mist rolls in from the hills
and covers the yard and windows
in darkness with so much moisture
that the roof forms bubbles
as if it were breathing into the sky
and the sky were turning inside out
until the sun’s disc settles
into the darkened water
leaving shards of light in the chasms
And now absence of light is the image
and each time I tell myself like a mantra
this emptiness is temporary
Some nights those bits of light
form shapes of the tales of
sailors and shepherds, stories
etched in stone, paper
and the rolling rhyming song
Retelling leads back to the images
and scattered light
______________________________
Nellie Hill’s work has appeared widely in literary journals including The Naugatuk River Review, The Harvard Magazine, Poetry East, Psychological Perspectives, Commonweal, Arroyo, The Belleview Literary Review. She has two books, and two chapbooks, most recently My Daily Walk (Pudding House). She has an acupressure practice in Berkeley, CA.
Contact:
Nellie Hill
16 The Crescent
Berkeley, CA 94708
510-540-0886
sundayjenks@sbcglobal.net