Sample Poems by Deborah Fleming

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Aubade


Slender light opens the cavern of darkness.
A red-wing's three-note warble awakens us
and we know instantly we have entered the world
again after wandering the troubled
labyrinths and corridors of sleep.
Your skin warm under my hand, your deep
inhalation are strong assurance. Morning
extends its wing as orioles sing
out in crystal voices that what we need
resides here. Fog veils recede,
and clouds rumple themselves across the sky.
Returning geese announce their triumphant cry.

---

Flight

1971


You and your wife standing side by side,
your grin narrows your eyes in the photo
snapped by our friend, behind you the wing
of your Piper Cadet. Four years ago

you were Daedalus fashioning your loneliness.
Some light in your eyes made me tremble
like a deer with an arrow in her flank.
When your plane roared and grew small

I imagined you gathered into bright air.
Now as the sun climbs the sky,
I see your suburban house from the ramp
of the highway. How easy it is to fly.

---

Two Old Men in the Bus Station

a rondeau with blues variation


Not so old, when I looked again,
both wearing greasy caps, two men
sitting on a bench, one black, one white,
in the bus station that night.
"Woman scratch y'eyes out," said one,

"Whatcha gone do? Steal ever thing y'own."
"Getcha pay er bills, then leave ya lone."
"Getcha buy er ever thing in sight."
Not so old, when I looked again.

"One said she loved me, I come in
she'd took all my gear and gone.
Them kids ain't even mine." "Ain't right."
They sat beneath the glare of light,
both wearing greasy caps, two men,
not so old, when I looked again.

---

Glendalough

1974


Fog rose from the mountains after rain.
Clouds drifted on the surface of the lake
and mountain ridges blue on paler blue,
until the wind ruffled the image in its wake.

We woke early, took the path by the church
where we met the day before,
glanced through the arch and carried with us
a bar of light on the narrow, graveled floor.

Generations of our sort
had seen wide eyes on the ringed cross,
felt the lichen-covered rocks,
briar-encircled, encircling moss.

We thought of the years
church and tower had lain in ruin,
and mused on the time when we would mix
our bones with the grass of the mountain

but not of the hour when we'd recall,
like a picture on a painted page,
stepping together among stream and sun
and droplets falling into the gorge.

We climbed the slope above the lakes.
Had fog come down, had wind not blown,
would we have felt the tides of our veins in the stream,
monument of our hearts in the ancient stone?

---

Hiking on Mount Rainier

1976


Branches crack. Sparks rise and disappear.
Inside a brightening circle of bricks
the fire roars over voices. I stare
into red-yellow flames that curl around sticks.
"Winter's sure going to be early this year."
"Did you make it up past the tree line?"
"The sun was blinding on the Ingraham Glacier."
Under snow fields, beside a twisted pine
I watched the mist boil below me
like a mad dream, veil green slopes and rock.
Balanced on a jagged mountain ledge,
I saw it ebb to shroud another valley.
When sun was new I risked fire and talk
to climb among those peaks to the edge.