Andrea Potos – Four Poems


 

Grief Fatigue

Awake, some days
you carry it–

a gravity of notes
intoning through your bones

an almost forgotten
landscape–your mother’s voice
last heard

through glittering veins of stone.


 


June Song

    One year later

Through the marrow
of summer
she was gone
through the hollow
of light
she moved
into the bone-
core of our longing,
now everywhere
peonies bloom
the colors of
her coral blouse
scattered with tiny
daylit stars.


 


Looking at the Photo of My Father’s Kitchen on the Realtor’s Site

The smooth maple cabinetry, the wall of floor to ceiling
windows opening onto the inland sea
of Lake Michigan, blues like the Agean blue
of my father’s ancestors; the deep green marble
kitchen island where we’d gather before birthday cakes,
Greek Easter dinners, Christmas morning brunches,
and spontaneous summer cookouts.  Just beyond the glass
on the patio now, my father arrives from the other world to stand
there again, sweating and grinning over the fat steaks
smoking and sizzling and filling the entire grill, always more
than anyone needed, my father always the potent believer
in having more than enough for everybody.


 


Emily’s Door

        Photograph by Jerome Liebling

From this cut-glass doorknob–
             an angel shot forth

a pistol of light–wings of spears or arrows
as it must be in her Amherst house:
every doorknob housing
its family of beings
(as floorboards keep their mice
and attic rafters their bats.)


 

Author’s Statement on Beauty

Though I cannot say for certain what beauty is, I know that it arrives as a recognition from within, a presence, an awe or quiet joy.  Beauty can only make us better humans, especially when we remain actively receptive to it, as the great Keats was when he wrote to his friend:  “. .. for I have learned to love the principle of beauty in all things.


 

Andrea Potos is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Arrows of Light from Iris Press. Another full-length collection is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2018. She recently received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry, and has also received three Outstanding Achievement Awards from the Wisconsin Library Association.