Poems by Barbara Quick
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Gift for My Newly Widowed Friend
(for Grace Cavalieri)
by Barbara Quick
Barbara spends a lot of time tending the edible gardens she's planted in the sandy loam of a small farm and vineyard on the Santa Rosa Plain, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Mayacamas Mountains.
If we learn now
to speak the language of angels,
death won’t stop our conversation.
I can’t speak to you of loss in this language
without feeling weighed down
by the clay of my body.
Will I learn before I die?
This jar of jam is filled
with all the sweetness to be coaxed
from black earth and a thicket of raspberry canes.
Marriage, in other words.
I’ve made it not too sweet,
so you can taste the foggy mornings
and the nights when you couldn’t sleep.
I’ve sent it too late
for you to taste it with him.
It’s winter now, and it seems these dry sticks
can’t possibly grow green and leafy,
heavy with fruit.
This is what faith is:
Knowing that the garden
will feed us again.
© Barbara Quick
Resurrection
by Barbara Quick
On the last day of the year
I plant tulips.
A magpie with a trowel,
I bury my treasure of hope.
In Holland, during World War II,
desperate Dutch children ate them—
years of starvation and scarcity,
when barrel staves were made to do
for bicycle tires.
In 1637,
a semper Augustus tulip bulb
was worth ten times the yearly earnings
of a barrel maker or twelve acres of land.
I’m not thinking of wealth or food
as I dig each little grave
and place each peeling, corpse-white bulb inside.
As darkness falls,
I tamp the soil down with one gloved hand,
my thoughts on resurrection.
© Barbara Quick
The Sand Nursery
by Barbara Quick
Shells from creatures once alive,
as if the soul were something calcified,
pink and brittle, worn on the outside and shed.
Shepherded here by the waves of this northern sea,
heaped up like sleeping sheep along the shore—
tiny shells as delicate as the ears of the unborn.
Susurrating, the amniotic waters wash away all memories
of those crude crustaceans with their oafish foot
and salty will to survive. All life washed out of them,
shellfish breathe their last and migrate here,
and wait to become sand, and then—
a goblet or a stained-glass window?
All of us who live now once were something else
and something yet again we will become—
washed clean of all we were,
all hardness crushed, the skeletons we so esteemed
worn down to dust.
We started out as starlight and slowly
We transform. This hand that writes,
tinged pink by early morning northern light,
will cease to live at some point
and become whatever follows.
Like the heaped-up seashells here,
evolving into sand.
© Barbara Quick