Watching the Merrimack

          By Jacqueline Malone

Water takes what is given

and makes visible the wind, the pull

of gravity, time in the constant

erosion of riverbeds, the constant

deposit of gravelly isles. Water

mixes, transforms, dissolves, and returns

silt, sand, and shells on river beaches,

the way the mind, always flowing on,

mixes and tranforms, returning

thought through the cataracts

of memory, rippling — glissando! —

into mingled currents, bypassing the angularity

of logic, quixotically favoring the preposition:

         under, around, between. The idle brain

spills past isles into the shady river run

where a dappled surface is shot through with light.

****

Lichen on the Graves

By Jacquelyn Malone

The Diana community, with its general store, post office,
one-room school, lies in this green hillside.
Under my feet coffins
and above ground old graves with no markers
that like bread loaves cobbled from field stones
sit on a kitchen-counter knoll bedecked with bittersweet
and slowly blooming lichen, that gray-green marriage
of fungi and algae that weathers stone to soil.
But not yet.

Here my ancestors lie—grandparents and neighbors
who, on their way to the general store, stopped to gossip
at the front porch swing; great grandparents
and their church social friends; great, great grandparents,
and a section for the boys who died in the Civil War.
Only two new burials in the seven years
since I last put flowers on family graves —
I’ve searched the headstone dates.

In the valley below a small stream runs
through the pasture where Jerseys graze, descendants
of cows brought over mountains, through wilderness
to small plots of land—enough for pasture and milk
with a few acres for cotton, tobacco, corn.

My relatives, my parents and I moved
to cities—Nashville, Detroit, Boston, Lowell….
Like the ruffled-edged lichen, we’ve spread out
as we die at the center.
This hilltop is as close as I get to a beginning.
Somewhere across the October-red valley
I hear the faraway caws of crows.

****

Jacquelyn Malone worked as Senior Web Writer/ Editor at IBM and Lotus Development Corp., as an adjunct taught both technical and scientific writing and editing at Northeastern. She also writes poetry and has won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship Grant in Poetry, is the author of a chapbook titled All Waters Run to Lethe, and has been published in numerous journals, including Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Lowell Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and have appeared on the website Poetry Daily.