Selected Poems

Untitled One

My sister's kitchen is a city in grease
where children skate the patterned lino
slide close to touch her apron
where the smell of green eggs is deafening
like Pavarotti practicing arpeggios in Padua
(he was really running in Pamplona)

When the wind whines hard we taste
the scent of pine tar on parted lips and
when we cannot see we close our eyes
and feel

The extraordinary grace of plain folk yearning
for life's green light to make
the dull days assume duality and direction

We are happy teetering tetherless
and irrepressible on the mountain watching
the hurricane for words
that move memory around.

- Cynthia Floor, 1995

A well

dripping dark water
beckoning cadence in time

a creak as the bucket
rises up with samll portions

to ply a young maiden
to drink at love's gate

a taste, just one sip

now her heart is a drowned train
on tracks running deeper

following the dark path
of the bucket that sinks

to the pile of Eskimo skeletons

at love's frozen depths

-Margaret Carey, 1995