by Catherine Abbey Hodges

At last and all of a sudden,
here it is: the afternoon to turn
summer’s last tomatoes,
some on the sill and others still
on the vine, into soup to freeze
for the months to come.

You take the chipped blue
bowl from the high shelf
and we head to the garden.
Overhead, what someone
called a buttermilk sky, sky
banking left from the long
bright days toward winter,
which is to say a mortal sky,
sky-sign of endings, death-
facing sky, lit still
with summer’s last syllables.
We fill the bowl again
and again with tomatoes
warm and heavy in their skins.

Later, we’ll listen
to what we can bear of the news,
and I’ll refuse the violence
that won’t end and must end
a place at the table
of this one poem
while the tomatoes burble
in their complex juices,
fragrant with the further
complications, complicities
if you will, of garlic
and rosemary.

We’ll look at each other.
It’s too much, you’ll say,
or I will—we take turns
like we used to tell the children
to do, and I lose track. Maybe
we’ll step outside where the early
stars will aver for the hundredth
time that the dark overtaking
the sky is another kind of light.
Though we’ll shake our heads
as always,
maybe this time we’ll pray
that somehow they know
something we don’t.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of In a Rind of Light, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in February 2020. Her previous full-length collections are Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), the latter selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Learn more at www.catherineabbeyhodges.com.

by Catherine Abbey Hodges

Sunday morning in the church of air,

great blue heron hunched over the good

book, chapters and verses swirling

about his legs.

Never the same river,

always the same word—history, proverb,

psalm, parable—and the one sermon

in many tongues season to season,

moment to moment, whether

I attend or not.

   Pews of lichened granite,

obsidian cherts that caught the light

before landing among the grasses

and fallen leaves:

the wood ducks

in the high windows know it all

by heart. Small birds with names

I don’t recall

sound from sycamores

like bells.

       And none of this depends

on me, though I see now that somehow

I depend on it—the river, the stooped

heron and the one rising on great wings

above its reflection, the Yokuts family

at home here

in the ouzel’s inner eyelid,

the wood ducks with their deep

memories

and the small birds

with their bells—

         you and I depend

on this whether or not we’ve ever

darkened the slim doorway,

lifted the latch that’s everywhere.

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Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of the poetry collections Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely and been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where she was named 2017 Faculty of the Year. She co-coordinates California Poets in the Schools for Tulare County and collaborates with her husband, musician Rob Hodges.