Considering Flight
This “novella in verse” examines the precarious dance between daughter and father through the minefield of mental illness.
Question For My Father Who Lives Alone
What if you and I were walking one day
and you said,
Can you smell the sap?
And I did?
What if you said,
The wind is brisk. It has a bite.
And I said,
Let’s go inside?
What if you said,
Sit at this table.
Here are my friends,
here and here and here,
and I touched each hand?
What if you said,
I will die now.
And I said,
Yes.
And you closed your eyes?
From Considering Flight, Brass Weight Press, 2006
Yielding to Calliope
Out of print
A diverse collection including “Portrait of the Artist as a Crotchety Old Woman,” “I Attend Divine Liturgy at the Jones-Moles Funeral Home” and “Lamont Pipes Night Tunes to the Fish.”
Kalon
Tonight with the fullmoon outside and the snow layering my redvan’s windshield
We sat on the couch and ate chocolate chip oatmeal cookies
And you weren’t ten years younger than me and you weren’t
A feminist-pagan-liberated-freelove-Wicca-babe and I wasn’t
A Christian-fundamental-rightwing-homemaking-evangelist
And you fed the fish and I told you secrets about me and you said
You weren’t really lonely and I believed you and I took off my hiking boots and
Stuck my feet under me on your couch and we stayed talking that way until
One in the morning. And you loaned me spellbooks full of Welsh names
And I talked about my Jesus and you talked about touching the Divine every day
And I said it didn’t matter if Jesus was true, only that I want him to be
And you said that didn’t make sense but you didn’t crush me with your words
And I knew we floated on a truth underneath the truth we were trying to say
There on your sofa and I knew that if God came into the world, he-she came into that Room with the fish and the cookies and two of us, more and more like sisters, sitting in Our socks and you fragile and luminous and wise and me expanding with a lightness as Our words twined round in spirals and up across the ceiling like incense.
From Yielding to Calliope, Brass Weight Press, 2002.
The Sudden Drown of Knowing
Out of print
Katherine’s first book of poems, including “Gentle into Twilight,” “Stairs of Sand,” and “Jacob.”
For Bells
I pray passion and genius
neatly trimmed.
I pray a cool pew
and a soft kneeler
fervently.
Don’t let ravens feed me by a stream
or giants taunt me.
Don’t come to me in visions in the night
or leap white-hot from the pages
I study.
Don’t loose my tongue, don’t wash my feet,
don’t bleach my white, white gloves
with blood
Or I must wear bells,
bells on my hem
and hear their glassy sound
to know I am alive.
From The Sudden Drown of Knowing, Brass Weight Press, 2000