All in by Catherine Staples

Without a Crown

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Staples

by Catherine Staples

What kind of life is the pine leading now—
not Lear on the heath or Richard in the tower.
Is it my father’s life at the end of life?

The slowed-down heartbeat of a northern bear,
slumbers broken by sharp waking, eyes
wide with the self that resides within?

When lightning struck our white pine, a fissure
halved her, rain of needles in our neighbor’s
pool—her verdant green gone rust-red.

Without a crown, her rough beauty undone,
the tree men scaled her to a high stump.
Confined, she’s nothing like herself.

Her long roots radiate across the yard.
She roams like a mad starfish under the earth,
some roots surface, hard as sea ropes with salt.

They tip above the lawn, nearly trip me
as I head out with peels of beet to feed
the compost. Teabags, carrots, winter’s

kindling for the next season’s feast: a butternut
fattens under a canopy, a fig brings bees
and elephantine leaves. All morning, windfall

into the hearth, I watch it blaze a torrent
of words, a snow-white semblance.
Singe of lichen spackles a fallen branch.

The fire keeps. My father sleeps upright
in his chair, I wake him with the oldest stories.
First the scuffed blue rowboat, then the beetle-cat.

Four of us scrapping for holds on the tiller,
my brother alive, the hair in his eyes.
Wind picks up offshore, our centerboard hums.

Hard-to-lee, hairsbreadth to the channel,
all we’d never know flying beneath us. 

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Catherine Staples is the author of two poetry collections: The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and The Academy of American Poets at poets.org. New work is forthcoming at Copper Nickle and Gettysburg Review. Honors include a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.

Antidote

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Staples

by Catherine Staples

The slander was a lie, but when whispered
In her ear it held, echoed.
Endless as a rock-pool brimming, a hidden
Spill of water, sounding a cave.

She listened though she knew it wasn’t true.
She shook her head.
The lie rose like yeast, like six seeds
Of pomegranate in the distraction of grief.

Ruined, it whispered and winter   
Swept the small room.
But the floor was lined in stone, old
Rock from a long gone inland sea.

The dark lines of fossils woke her—
The still beauty
Of curved spines and wings,
Birds. Ferns. Whole ferns survived

Exact even to the dark spores on fronds.
A river bank and a bay tree.

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Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, and others. Recent honors include a Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writer’s Conference and the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award. She teaches in the English and Honors programs at Villanova University. Please visit at: www.catherinestaples.com.