Cynthia Anderson (3 poems)
Pilgrimage
At the beach house, a weathered pillar of wind and salt,
I’m the woman across the table from an empty chair,
the only one there, an acolyte of the bloody new moon,
tracking its lack of light across broad swaths of sand.
Each day I walk the labyrinth of the dunes, losing
then finding my way, epiphanies of rapture and grief.
The one shell I find, broken, seems to hold the echo
of a scream—at least, that’s what I hear when I press it
to my ear. I quickly throw it back, watch the flood tide
tumble it away like it never existed. That’s when
I know my exile is over—time to return to the land
of my birth, that inland empire of rustling leaves.
What Will It Take
Awake again—
these long night hours
crawl on their knees
towards an unseen oasis
under a full moon
bright as crystal.
That savage light
casts shadows
sharp enough to tear,
to sever—there’s
no place for soft flesh
in this landscape.
Thrashing the bed,
thirsting for calm,
I find, instead,
the rack—a mass
of high, thick,
fast-moving clouds.
I need voices
other than my own
to tell me—
what will it take
to find a way out
of this desert?
A Long Goodbye
Winter came more suddenly
than earth.
You were accustomed
to the ground beneath
your feet—so familiar,
as though it would last
forever, with you ranging
upon it—
then this hard freeze,
this bleak cold
that shut your eyes
and stopped you
in mid-stride. Shorn of hope,
you mourn the frailty
of your own form passing
into the dark
to be remade. A rarefied
air surrounds you,
prelude to decay—
enough to nurture
the hurt of not existing.
Unmoving, you wait
for the thaw—in your own
time, on your own
terms, you dissolve
and fall as snow.
Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Spillway, Crab Orchard Review, Apercus Quarterly, Askew, San Pedro River Review, Mojave River Review, The Coil, and Split Rock Review. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of seven poetry collections and co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens. www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com