Diane Doty Averill (2 poems)
On the Last Day of Summer
As my sister walks towards me
her hair once raven
becomes silvery
shining as her face
nears mine.
We breakfast alongside
autumn crocus, a lavender lantern
breathing beside an ancient grey rock.
Returning home to a phone that
cries, an eighty-year-old widower
in a distant city
tells me he wants
to take his wife outside in the sun
because the last thing she could enjoy
was turning her blind face towards the warmth
without punctuation I cry with him
she was my friend, too.
This opens the afternoon to another voice,
a woman I love, now thirty years under the earth,
urges me once again to cross the shaded sidewalk
to the other side of the street, saying
Let’s walk in the sun as long as we can.
So I stroll along the dappled day
stopping for a wooly caterpillar crossing
and as I bend to watch
it moves along so slowly it grows older---
by the time it gets to the other side
its orange band has lengthened
predicting a severe winter.
I could have held it curled in my palm
helped it to the other side
but I am only a watercolor my shadow paints.
In the evening
a black dog curls around another
darker dog, old girlfriends.
A few jewels shine through the clouds,
singing them into another season.
In the Morning City
The face of a news anchor on my big-screen TV
turns emoji-sad. “And now we’ll focus on “The Homeless Problem.”
An earnest young reporter in a Patagonia jacket appears on the screen
while a blood-red geranium petal falls,
floats down from my window box to the concrete below
as I look at him from my sixth-floor condo.
He tells viewers that more and more people appear each day,
making it sound like a magic trick.
I wrap my warm fleece closer around my shoulders,
keep looking down
while a shadow steps out of a blue tarp tent
right behind him.
A woman curled on a curb cries under shifty clouds.
The reporter zooms in to ask her why.
“I was raped one night and am afraid to go to sleep.”
He nods sympathetically then turns away,
showing us three men fighting with sticks
and I know this happens every day. Avoiding them,
he sweeps along the concrete, showing the detritus of human tragedy:
used needles, Styrofoam plates and cups. Such a public nuisance.
People sit crowded around eating from brown paper bags
given to them by shelters where they no longer are able
to eat or shower inside. He shakes his head in dismay.
“There’s no social distancing here.”
I sleep beneath a flowered down comforter,
knowing there is no room for dreams down there.
He points to orange porta-potties, unaware of how often
I’ve seen drug deals made within them, then to an occasional hand-washing station
before the cut-off for a commercial break.
I click the remote: blank screen.
I don’t know if I’ll get my old job back, or what is coming next,
so I count my gratitudes one more time.
Tonight the spin doctors will wrap up everything
talk to medical experts and then to politicians about the pandemic.
Are we all flies in a world-wide-web?
Diane Averill’s first book, Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, (University of Florida Press) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award as was her second book, Beautiful Obstacles, (Blue Light Press.) She has also had three chapbooks published. Her work appears in many literary magazines such as "The Bitter Oleander," "Poetry Northwest," "Tar River," and most recently “The Avocet,” “Cirque,” “Mom Egg Review,’ “Santa Clara Review,” and “Sparks of Calliope.” Her work also appears in several anthologies. She is a graduate from the M.F.A. program and taught at Clackamas Community College until retirement.