Ellen Porter
8/7/07
Brother Thomas, Potter I.

Your hands
the miraculous modelers
of clay, remain long
and thin and beautiful
while the sum of your essence,
body and soul,
splinters like dry wood,
thirsting for rain.
It is the antithesis of
clay to porcelain.
Secret glazes have
fashioned pots
inimitable
their value in museums
their sacredness in your heart
keep them the sole
gift of your flaming spirit.

Now cancer captivates your body.
Today you cannot sit at your wheel
and today you cannot lift virgin clay.
You rest in your studio
waiting as malignant cells
take your magnificent dreams
and, pressing them earthbound,
forbid their transformation to miracle from clay.


Ellen Porter
7/30/07
Fivefold Gift

These eyes, opening early
blinking moistly against new light
one eye squinted closed to
bring the images sharp and focused.
Even now, before sunrise defines
what lies in darkness
my vision waits, lurking to bring
shadow to form.

And my skin trembles with
early morning air, moving soft
and often.

My ears wait for
birdsong, a sense on edge
searching out habitable branches,
tentative, eager.

The smell of summer lingers
through the night, tangy,
sun-dusted, sweet.

And milky coffee,
every morning the taste
of darkness, not yet diluted,
welcomes me to a pure and feral dawn.

No matter what lies behind the shadows—
what poems, what creatures, what fragile trees—
these senses quiver in readiness to claim
one unrepeatable, inexplicable
new day.


Ellen Porter
8/22/07
I Have Spoken Enough of Death

I have spoken enough of death
and now put it to sleep
until its time to rise again.
Who knows? Maybe my death approaches,
or the one whose eyes I meet
strolling the garden, blissfully
unaware of death’s lurking, perhaps
one of us will be next to lie
wooden, waxen, stilted, to be viewed
in order that this new loss be believed.

I have spoken enough of death
and now will walk,
heart and spirit relieved, I will walk
among the trees, the maple, the
pine, and the berry bushes, their
fruit long eaten by raucous birds.
I will walk close and feel the roots
settling beneath my feet, my bare feet
remembering the life spreading underground,
new shoots nudging their way sunward.


Ellen Porter
6/23/07
Niggling

All day long
from its predawn conception
till the solstice sun
balanced on the edge of Lake Erie
the poem niggled at my mind.

A hundred times
I returned to my clip board
my chair
and read the lines aloud,
scratched out a word here
added another there.

Now, perhaps a finished product,
it lies on the floor beside my chair.
The poem watches me
dares me not to pick it up
and read again.
I look away
hoping the dark will fall soon
and hoping—
hope against hope—
that it will leave me
to sleep dreamless
through the night,
collecting fodder for
the poem that may
steal away tomorrow.


Ellen Porter
8/28/07
Separation

You boarded the one fifteen train to Chicago
and in our last minutes together
we watched the stars against
the deepest darkness, night softening the
whirling of the spheres.

As I drive home
my mind imagines you,
hurling past dried up stores,
half-used railway stations,
long stretches of weedy fields, pungent,
in air too dark to see.

At home, in my bed,
I watch two become three and no sleep
to conquer twitching muscles of
worry for tomorrow’s weary day.
We may never meet again
and that slides across my heart,
rapids drifting cold stones,
and no regrets.
It was a good time here,
your visit, my hospitality.

And as I listen, quiet, sheets pulled back
against the August heat,
I hear the groaning whistle of another train,
yours racing far ahead,
and wonder how you would parse
the short span of these
long-anticipated days.


Ellen Porter
6/3/07
Symptoms

Twenty years ago
when I received
the burden of the word,
when my body was named cancerous,
I expected certain things—
pain and wasting, nausea perhaps,
most certainly an early death.

But I did not expect
to be surprised.
I was startled by
the sudden breathlessness,
the dizziness that
leads to fainting
and the awful, drenching sweat.

After all this time,
two decades,
I am grateful to barter away
the expected horrors
that never came to fruition.
The other manifestations
are no longer a surprise
but instead, a long
disruptive grace.


Ellen Porter
7/19/07
Wild Places

Until recently
I have found God only
in wild places:
while surfing Pacific waves
an eye open for dolphin or whale;
scrambling through granite bowls
the Sierra carved by glacial ice;
or walking desert arroyos
keeping watch for snake and cougar.
God is god of astounding vision,
of harmonies spawned in windy corners,
of the fragrance of white sage.

But in these last years,
confined by the inner city,
I find another kind of wild space:
drug dealers cruising,
beckoning young women,
prostitutes willing to sacrifice their souls
for the next temporary dose of heaven;
garden plots torn up, tomatoes flung
like ready-made grenades;
and occasionally wildflowers pushing up
through sidewalk cracks.
I begin to see God’s fingerprints.

Now, early in the morning
before the sun finds its path to my window
I take up fine blank paper and pen
and stare into the wild places of my soul.
God has followed me even here.