Sample Poems by Lois Marie Harrod

What the Mist Sings

White Mountains, New Hampshire
The car fades down the follow
where the trees lose

their greens and grays,
your father is leaving forever

as his gods did, that old dizziness
lifting from the far lake,

you looked so gauzy in your dress,
but hush your mother said,

what is whispered clays
the mist, becomes the whitest hair,

do you see your grandmother hazy
on your head and your own face skiffing

towards the groggy urn? The trees
stand close and think

in the vapor of their former selves,
disappearing humps

who can live live now
without choice, without belief

rooted to the spot
as the mist rises

like breath
moving from you.

Barn with Snow

Outside Littleton, New Hampshire

I am so tired of it,
sadness falling like a snow,
the tin roof freezing
beyond the sleet.

Not that I die,
just botch up the calendar
lying diurnal
in the white room.

There are more months
than the narrow moon
you brought on Tuesday,
and all seem sore.

You want to know
why I went angry
to the barn
in the first place,

and I'm not able
to say stop
or to stop miming
forgiveness,

so I turn to the wall
and recant my body
as I've done before
when I'm too cold to sleep.

Dream with a Beard and a Gull

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Last night a beard appeared
like an unexpected rhyme,
half-inch of hair over my fair
face, curly as thyme

or is it parsley, and black
as night the wrong side of star.
This is why men no longer desire
me, I said in my sleep,

my beard, my trite gull feet
slipping into the yin-yang of time.
My chin has gone flabby.
I sit and stare and then rant on,

the face shifts like forgotten fog,
the oncoming cars come on,
I know a woman who cannot
stop being angry at the man

who left 37 years ago.
Move on, move on.

Voltages for Different Locations

And I began to think of my heart as a ferris wheel
suddenly appearing above balloons and electric bulbs
in that field which, for many years, had yielded
nothing but a rusty shopping cart upended in the weeds,

a wheel that for a dollar I could ride above the burdock
and riffraff, one that would disclose on the horizon
hills nested like green eggs under feathery gills,
one in which I could trust the great bolts and screws

wrenched in a noon by sweat and flapping
shirt, a wheel from which I might drop postcards
to the man who tried to climb to that great height

and thought there is no way down but fall,
where I might sit rocking and tremulous, a minute or two,
and then descend, a little wobbly, clinging to the rod.