Sample Poems by Carole
Stone
KnowledgeWho is left to
remember
Mrs. Wilcox stamping the dates in blue on the card
in its tiny
envelope glued in the two books
you could take out for a week?
Who is
left to remember
lingering in the dark stacks until closing time
touching
the books as if they were parents
who could fill you with
knowledge?
Langston Hughes and his dream,
Millay with whom I rode all
night on the ferry,
Whitman whose free verse I embraced.
I am left to
remember,
me, of the after-school library hours,
who went home to a
house without love,
the girl who raised herself
page by
page.
Get Up In Upper
Lower Michigan,
across the street from Bootlegger's Restaurant,
at the Bookie
Joint Bookstore,
in Frank O' Hara's Lunch Poems,
Lana Turner has
collapsed.
It's July 12, ten to nine,
stars coming out like sequins
on
Lana's snood, the sun setting
into Lake Michigan, large
as the Atlantic of my
childhood,
my father rum running out there on the water,
Uncle Sid taking
bets in the attic,
my mother coughing endlessly.
It's good to think that I,
the gangster's daughter, write poetry;
that I am alive after a terrible
disease,
that at nearby Interlochen Music School,
my granddaughter Maggie's
fingers
ride the great black piano.
No catastrophe in sight.
Is that you
Lana, Frank, mother
on the spit of sand lapped so gently?
We love you, get up!
ObituaryEvery morning I read
the Times obituaries.
First I check ages, how many lived
to their eighties, then,
figure
how many years I might have left.
I skip to place of birth, death, parents,
education.
Then back to life-stories, as if they could tell
who we are in all our
guises.
What shall I say in mine?
That my father was a racketeer,
that
my mother stayed awake,
waiting for him to come home.
That they died young.
An aunt and uncle raised me.
Shall I list my degrees,
my books of
poetry?
Will there be room to say
that each day I write and re-write
my
poems, moving lines
from one stanza to another,
taking out words,
putting
them back.
I Who Bring Forth
MuffinsI was that four year old in the photo,
legs
crossed on a kitchen stool,
my black patent Mary Janes
poking out from my
pink dress,
bangs yellow as corn muffins,
banana pulp oozing on my fingers.
Cranberry muffins with cups of sugar
so my mouth won't pucker.
Pumpkin muffins orange
as a July sundown.
Bran muffins,
grain
of my middle age.
I read each recipe like a poem.
Small girl that I
was
in that Brownie camera photograph,
one day I will be poured out
like batter and bake
in the warm sweet earth.