Sample Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson

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Traces

They were the first trails, these branches
making their way into the sky.
Creating their own passage,
traveling without being noticed,
transforming the air into the ways of wood.
How far they can reach in a lifetime is
anyone's guess. On clear nights
under a full moon, they make a fine
netting. A spider web whose filaments weave
in every direction. The trails grow thinner
the higher they reach. The work is never complete.
What do the dark lines seek?
How do you follow such intricate crossings?
Maybe these traces are all
the markings we have to connect.

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Descent

A man is playing solitaire as we begin
our descent. Taps his thumb on each
numbered heart and spade on his phone.
To his right out the window
a steel wing. At this moment I remember
the ceiling at the airport where the security
lines form. The ceiling painted blue with clouds,
so we have something to look at as we remove
our shoes and belts, empty our pockets,
put our hands over our heads for the camera.
The man playing solitaire doesn't look out.
His reddish beard twitches. He has
a tattoo of a Chinese sign on his wrist.
Out the window the horizon's streaked green
between nothing and nothing. Below us
the world's cloaked in darkness as the plane
plunges through a cloud. The aisle is lit.
We're all buckled in-for a moment
our shoulders touch. But we're unreadable,
our lives invisible to each other
who see only the surface of things.

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Where the Map is Cropped, the Real Place Begins

Go down stairs
past the silk clothes
of ancestors you hold in your blood,
then draw to the rivers,
to the tables laid bare,
of rosehips and fireweed
under the roughest passages
to where a woman once burrowed
inside a freshly killed moose
to stay alive
for all she couldn't hold.