“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” --Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer _______ Jennifer's work can be found at: The Poetry Porch poets Poetry Porch feature The Sonnet Scroll Poetry Porch archives SF Poetry Broadside A review of Jennifer's work at www.artseditor.com ________ To order from bn.com Old Direction of Heaven ___________ Email: Jennifer Rose

Jennifer Rose Lake Forest Postcard Crows squawk each morning like dogs barking back and forth, waking me up. I’m homesick. I walk a lot. Yesterday I stalked a heron as he waded up the creek while I remained half a block behind—a Moslem wife resigned to all fate had assigned her. Today I took my guidebook to the field and tried to match the flowers with photos there. My jackpot came whenever a flower and photo tied— a slot machine whose payoff was a single name. Poplars waved their white-gloved leaves like royalty. A viceroy pumped its bellows then became the flame. White butterflies flapped dollhouse sheets above the flowerheads like Goldilocks looking for the right size bed. (I thought of you in our bed and your lovely face, your breasts beneath a negligee of Queen-Anne’s lace. The coneflowers’ nipples aren’t as nice as yours, whose rosehip ripens like its metaphors. Oh, to lie with you in meadows no one mows, wrapped up in prairie calicos!) “Tsk, tsk,” say the cicadas of my homesickness and wasted life. Blue jays laugh about my endless grief. Fireflies, on the other hand, understand my loneliness; they sting the dark with sudden pangs of it. Crickets tick like clocks set out to comfort just-weaned puppies and soothe me as your breathing does, wind sieved through screens, waves smoothing sand in tony suburbs all along the lake. Darling, whatever it was I came for escapes me now. All that’s left to do here is to ache. Metaphors at Low Tide The tide bows out like an obsequious servant till sand flats stretch, vast as the floor of a janitor’s nightmare. Clumps of green fleece are wet mops gone clammy—again, his bad dream. Careful as a Jain with no one to sweep for him, I tiptoe among the periwinkles. Hermit crabs scurry like tow trucks around the snails’ stalled traffic. In the world of their puddle it is all so purposeful! Gulls, which earlier dropped clam-bombs on the beachhead, are calm now—Victorian women wading, or penguins on their tundra. What am I to them, I wonder? Cumulus? Colossus? Or are they less curious than I am, examining these razor clams ditched by hoodlums when they heard the foghorn’s siren? Straw surf—dried eel grass—breaks along the beach. Miles of sand marcelled by wind pantomime the waves which brought that silent surf here. No undertow is safer. Drained, the bay’s a closet opened up to show a child no monster lurks there; filled, the darkness irks her still with fears she can’t explain. To calm her then, the tide—a patient mother—goes out yet again.