Ellen Porter
7/22/07
A Smooth Melancholy

With thirteen summers to my name
I sat on the hard black bench
playing, adagio, the smooth
melancholy of a Mozart sonata.

My dog, foaming where her red tongue
used to lap my face. Her body
still bearing life, trembling.
My father made the call and
readied himself, not with Mozart
but with the smell of sage on the
steep mountain slope behind the house.

As I played, my mother,
missing the ritual dance
my father and I performed,
called to me,
“Don’t you care at all?”
I didn’t answer but
played through to the end.

My father and I and my dog
bumbled into the car
and began her last trip into town.
And at the animal hospital
my father let me smell her
for a final time, and let me
feel her patient head against mine.
I did not go in
but my father held her
for her final breath.


Ellen Porter
8/9/07
Continuing Formation

Slouching around newly wiped dining room tables
we listen to a visiting teacher
on fire with Old Testament lore.
She speaks her surprises as much
with her hands and arms and torso
as with her constant, erudite tongue.

She tells us she can presuppose,
we being a roomful of Catholic religious,
that we already know certain basic truths
that she can leap into her treasures,
scattering facts like fireworks,
already halfway to her thesis’ proof.

But my eyes and soul wander
out the steamy windows,
shedding my biblical memories
like lines of water hurrying down a yellow, weatherproof coat
to stroll through the light falling rain, invincible,
watching the fawn, still spotted, still brave,
no eyes for my ghost,
frolicking under the summer laden apple trees.


Ellen Porter
7/27/07
Gratitude

Seven days
set aside
not for holy leisure or
sacred space
but as a celebration
of what we have given up.
No work or chores or promises to keep
but instead an emptiness
to be filled with books and naps,
resplendent meals and time
for sitting in the woods
just looking,
just listening
to the early morning whirr of insects
and birdsong.

And now those seven days
spent
the emptiness filled
with rabbits and the sudden red
of cardinals, flying,
rain-drenched maple and cottonwood.
The emptiness filled
and no going back to
change what embroiders
that spent time.
Tomorrow I will
return to paper work, telephones, errands,
full to overflowing
with rabbit whiskers
and rain.


Ellen Porter
4/30/07
Maggie

Cancer bloomed in her
like orchids
breast and ovary her gardens.

She held her fear gently
in both hands
watching blossoms open slowly.

And then surgery
cutting away each flowering strand
leaving no fertile loam.

As a gardener
turns under fallow ground
chemotherapy turned her soil impotent.

Treatment finished
she rubs her head
stubbles of a new crop of hair
and says, “It takes so long!”

And I whisper back
“A new healthy field.
You have been given years.”


Ellen Porter
8/30/07
Remembering

I do not yearn
for childhood again
but my soul,
broken open and molded
on ancient memories,
sometimes hovers, flitting
like a Mariposa butterfly
sure of its way home.
Memory and soul grow together
shape-shifting my essence.
I am that child, that teenager,
now this adult,
the sum of all that went before,
yet changed in the melding
to a person neither the child
nor I could recognize
save the trove of memories,
cocoon to chrysalis to wings,
that change me in remembering.


Ellen Porter
4/3/07
Sr. Estelle Marie

Sr. Estelle, child sized
but grown in argument and will.
Ninety some years old
a mind rooted in events
of long ago.

She rides the passenger seat
on the way to the dentist
and reads aloud each sign we pass.
(She has often complained of
total blindness
but that isn’t the case with road signs today.)
Railroad crossing, deaf child,
Burch’s peaches, ripe and sweet.

When we arrive at the office
she refuses at first
to leave the security of the car.
I urge her along and she comes,
never timid, in her own time.

Inside we watch a mother
in the waiting room
tending her six year old daughter.
The child climbs into her mother’s lap
and is enfolded in gentle love.
Sr. Estelle watches closely and
then dares to take the chance.
“Would you like to hold me, too?”
Her dentures clack in a mouth
grown child small.


Ellen Porter
8/2/07
Undistracted

There is nothing pleasant
about living in the present moment
when all that moment holds is pain.

But it is not true that’s all there is.
Besides, there are dirty socks under the bed
and silvery cobwebs up in the corner
dangling sticky and secure.

Still, my attention cannot leave
the one thing—
pain—
pulling me from a kindly dream.

What could have prevented the present concentration
allowing my mind to wander
to meander beyond the
cocoon of my body
the yellow ocher of these walls?

And then
all of it
the pain and socks and cobwebs
even the pinpoint focus of the present moment
first precludes and then yields
the anatomy of a poem.