Caroline Misner

Caroline Misner Poems

The frill of trees jig their lady skirts
about their knees, buckling
under the weight of the wind’s hard approach.
When we exhale, our breaths dangle,
...

Death is not sudden, death does not grieve,
Death takes a while to achieve.
Death comes in layers;
Death is the mouse
...

Pale and translucent as pink lemonade,
the morning sun filtered its petals
to pure lightness;
...

They hold the power to pinch the sky,
little eyes, a multitude
so vast they outnumber us all
who have ever lived and ever will;
...

The old town buzzes and people swarm
to finger the treasures offered
from pushcart stalls,
the golden apples and lumpy pears.
...

6.

There is a crack in the clouds
where sunbeams leak.
If I stand beneath their lustrous rays
will the sun shine done only on me?
...

The sun scoured the horizon until the sky bled,
a scarlet strip of grit.
We wandered through a valley
where vacant swings dipped,
...

It shouldn’t have gone on like this—
the protracted days of dust
that rises like steam from the roads,
the pink-brown mist of grains
...

Poor fish
who never made it to August
in 1963. It was
a good year, that year
...

A cardinal and wren
twirl together among the branches
of an alder;
...

I bring important news from the clinic.
You know…

The kingdom of green-walled waiting rooms
...

The factory chimney hisses and fizzles,
curling the edge of the sky, grey
as ash; the buoyant air is filled with mist,
spraying from the harbour where corroded
...

A crackless carapace, pale and blue
as the ocean that swarms around him,
he glides like a sailboat along
the guileless waves; he leaves
...

Thirty-two miles left to go;
a chill wheezing, damp and fragile,
into the morning fog that flanks
the phantom pines like crooked fingers
...

I awake each morning disappointed
that I’m still alive,

viewing you from a hanged man’s
...

A couple sits beside me
in the food court of the mall,
scouring the grey sticky film
from lottery tickets
...

I plan on giving this up very soon;
the labour is just too much for me.
I plan a simple departure—
no fanfare, no tears, no departing
...

I


They fight wars like civilized men,
...

How to eat a grape:

Pluck it from a withered stem.
Hold it on your tongue.
...

Summer comes waltzing in slick leafy shoes,
whirling her fragrant skirts about her knees.
The momentary goddess of all that’s green,
stitching a smile into her jaw, sighing
...

The Best Poem Of Caroline Misner

A Hard Climb

The frill of trees jig their lady skirts
about their knees, buckling
under the weight of the wind’s hard approach.
When we exhale, our breaths dangle,
rearranging syllables and accents
the Yanks still claim we carry.

The clouds recoil in pieces of time;
inch by inch they scud across the sky,
downy spools drawing in their lines.
The black hills ball against the blue,
splash their painted trees, golden
glowing corridors to wander through.

Dropped leaves assemble into cobblestones
of amber and scarlet upon the path,
carpeting the gnarled and bulging roots
like the blue swollen veins in an old man’s hand.
The boughs rattle when we near,
scramble brittle flakes about
like a shaken globe of snow.

Sequestered birds, plump from the summer’s binge,
weigh down the perch of each branch and twig.
It’s a hard climb up these knuckles of rock;
the stone and spine of earth create a natural stair;
moss and frosted lichen cushion our path
tramped by those who passed through here,
leaning on sticks cracked off the edge
of fallen logs. Other people scatter like ants
at our approach; everyone’s come to find a reflective solitude.

At the summit we finally see
the river we couldn’t find at first;
having lost our way we decided
to climb the escarpment instead.

Laundry laps in the wind,
dangling and dancing on its hinge;
each farm has a patched quilt plot;
the remnants from the last harvest,
the beans and pumpkins,
have already been left out
in the sun to rot.
Gaunt and troubled sunflowers
flank the gardens;
brown heavy heads droop
as though in prayer—
they already know they are dying.

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