This week's Poet of the People is Catherine Zickgraf. Catherine, aka Catherine the Great is a mother hen of poets of all ages, educational backgrounds and genres and is a force in South Carolina and Georgia that reverberates throughout the spoken word and written poetry community. If you don't know her you have resided too long in your little office listening to your own voice or parrots who sound a lot like you.. I am honored to call her friend.
Two lifetimes ago, Catherine Zickgraf performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her work has appeared in Pank, Deep Water Literary Journal, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Kelsay Books.
Find her on twitter @czickgraf. Watch/read more at www.caththegreat.blogspot.com
Poem to Lost Poems
At the riverbank, she writes
while her letters stretch wings,
slip wind, skim away.
So she shelters her words,
nails wood without hinges to the floor,
singes the threshold and corners.
Groundwater carves the chalk rock.
She’s learning to find the darkness
in the humid chill of earth’s stone web,
in moss-floored pools that shadow-shift
with a breath of candlelight.
Still the arch outside connects the riversides,
brides of the rapids flow home to sea
with the surfaced words of she who
sees now with mind, not eyes.
Where rivers scoop lakes at their estuaries,
a marble she holds encases the oceans.
Seeking the self inside,
she polishes the sky’s eye.
Pulling rope up the riverside,
she swings into the long line of horizon.
Yasou! A Celebration of Life, July 2020
In the Dilation of Eye
We chilled for three days.
But when you started staring
out my back windows into the woods,
I knew I had to return you to the wild.
You have eyes that can mirror earth or sky,
that hide in your environment.
You are oak leaf and grass, aqua and azure.
Take me with you.
Let me swim in your iris
and the well of your pupil
toward horizons and the trees.
Vita Brevis, August 2020
Saving a winged animal
that gets lured in by the porch light
requires at least three human hands:
mine to catch/seal creature from escape
and my helper’s to kill lights/open door
so I can release it into the night.
It’s always been my job to rescue
beings that don’t belong inside
(unless its slithery, bitey, or stingy).
The cats help by gently delivering
me tiny, living lime-green lizards—
so mostly all these complex little
things get returned to roam the earth.
Savannah Dusk
Now is the hour
when cypress trees dim into shadows.
The river is lingering along the bank
in puddles caught among braided roots.
Ageless sky deepens, wavelets go still,
the water seems to slow and fall silent.
This is the ceremony of sinking dusk—
when our reflections turn dark and
dim blues fade in the calmness of night.
Goodnight
Kira and I decided one evening before I had to go in
and get a bath that after bedtime we would call
out our windows to each other from across the alley.
First grade, I was still crazy awake when they’d
tuck me in, the sky so full of daylight. But having her
to talk to at night would be like double-dutching the
telephone lines that crossed the canyon between
our streets—I’d never be bored again. Yet from my
row of homes in my treehouse bedroom two and
a half stories up, the only word I heard was goodnight.
Neuro Logical, January 2021
Somnambulant
When they sleep down deep at night,
she tunnels out the powder room window
into drizzle and mist, hops fence.
She kicks through currents along the curb,
crosses street, descends the bank
toward the creek’s down-streaming sounds.
Twelve and barefoot all summer,
she’s unafraid of treading the pebble beds,
leaps cold rocks to boulders,
splashing the stars of the water.
Breeze moves through the woods,
the moon-lattice shifts around her.
Though curtained with night and still invisible,
she slips back in through the bathroom window—
almost ready come pain of day
when they’ve opened wide their eyes.
Overnight
Into my window fall stars long as dreams, I slip through the screen.
Night grows a poem stretching prima toes to cross street then creek
stepping soft on the forest floor. Over shivering beds of dark stones,
the sparkle-moon follows me home.
Even through moon and drizzle, the train plumes billowing into the
clouds navigate my backyard valley. They vibrate my candle flame
until its last breath sifts out the window, when whistles trail off and
tracks flow into the starlight horizon.
The pines don’t drip with shadows behind our house, out of reach
of the streetlight. Past the creek line bordering our woods, the oak
leaves close their eyes. The creatures of the low sky hush us calm,
I’m returning my mind to its dream.
Origami Poems Project, April 2020
Minimal
In the fullness of summer, mowers decapitate green necks
of dandelions and red clover,
slicing their flowers between matted blades.
We stop gashing our lawn as it’s shocked with October frost.
When the winter wind spreads arms down the valley,
my garden zinnias turn to death and skeletalize.
On the back porch tonight, I reach through the atmosphere,
lengthening glowing arms into space. I ease the moon
from its netted cradle, an egg nested in my palm.
I am minimal, though, under the sky’s dark quilt.
I’m a speck in the weeds of my acre yard
on a tiny rock rounding its ancient orbit.
Visitant, October 2017