Patti Masterman Poems

Summer no longer clothes itself, for me:
I'm always barren winter now, gone to seed.
My flowers gone back to root and rot;
Summer's waltzes and festive engagements
...

I learned to breathe by being dumped unceremoniously
On the shores of some distant world
I had heard only through flesh-muffed sounds
Of an encapsulated ocean, for nine months.
...

Her dead face wounds me,
Apprehends me, in my flowing breath
Arrests me for the flagrant violation of still living
After she has died, for her belief.
...

Live edgewise, never remember
People owed or displaced
Time goes in fits and starts
Life is a filthy, seeping river
...

Flash in the pan, my tempestuous heart;
The art temporal composes your parts
While thinking you're dying, or that you might live,
Depends what significant others would give.
...

Every day somewhere, there is a middle-aged woman
Who stands above some wheel-chair bound, some bedridden person
Someone wrinkled and blanketed, who seems uncaring about anything.
And she says, 'Mother; Grandfather, do you know who I am;
...

Memory is a cool pool of checkered fabrics
brushing up against eyelet smiles
on the long summer days
when we wore almost nothing;
...

Stop wondering;
You don't have to wonder any more;
Stop feeling lost
...

Every day, I hear one of my loved ones
Call out my name; even though they're dead;
Gone away, to where we should never speak-
But still they keep on calling for me.
...

When we first met
I could not see your spirit at all;
I had to tease it out, with the feather of my breath.
...