Three Poems by Sarah Seidel
Rock Table
From the table I have set beneath the oak tree and covered with the relics of my wanderings, you choose the limestone, with the ancient sea shells nestled and crowding. As you turn it over in your hands, let me tell you of our walks to the desert canyon, stepping slowly, sinking briefly, releasing the scent of rain buried in the wash, scrap of sky above tangled saltbush, creosote, and sage. It is the same anywhere, blindly following the turns, looking for the confluence, that is the sign, for the creek bed, that is the way, to the crooked gash in the side of the far-off hills. Seeking its cool shade, its perpetual pools, its crevasses where cactus and yucca tuck themselves in. Wondering again if the spring’s growth has covered, if the winter’s storms have resculpted, if the summer’s heat will turn us back before reaching, the opening.
There are still quiet places
There are still quiet places. I found one once at a bus stop on the east side of the park on the south side of an oak with a north wind whipping my hair around my face. The doves were gently cooing, syncopated by the rackety rustle screech of a grackle. Across the road an excavator sat frozen in mid dig, the upper windows of the unfinished building open, a piece of pink insulation bowed and weaved like an eel emerging from an underwater hole. I had no pen, so I repeated these words over and over until later, in a noisy room, on a top floor overlooking a construction site, I clickety clacked them out of my head let the stillness go.
Morning after the storm
A tree limb fell in the night
shattered a car’s window
left a carpet of leaves and green sheathed pecans
still too soft and damp for eating.
I go with my bag and the dog
to the end of the alley
crouching, harvesting
one after another
an opportunist
a thief
a cheapskate
a forager
the long-shelled pecans that had covered my grandmother’s yard
the ones blind Uncle Bob could crack in his bare hands
not so sweet and oily
not so red-brown but lighter
like my skin after summer
like sandal leather before the sun
like my grandfather’s carvings before the varnish
like Millie’s hair before the wig.
That’s why I’m here
squatting and sifting
through scatterings
filling this bag before I return.
I am only here to recollect.
Sarah Seidel studied creative writing at the University of Notre Dame and Chapman University. Her poetry has appeared in Eastern Iowa Review and Deep Wild. She is returning to writing after several years as a public health researcher and is working on poetry and completing two novels, one of which she started 20 years ago.