Dianna MacKinnon Henning (3 poems)
At Winter’s Start
In the crimson blaze of wind cuffed leaves
and early migratory flocks,
scent of impending winter seeps through our windowsills,
the house damp, its chill a reminder:
stack wood, split kindling.
I think of a loved one recently set to earth,
the shovel’s heavy work,
and wonder if my deceased friend heard
crows so masterful, their chorus
split the hour while we stood graveside,
attempting to shoo away those cheeky birds. Exactly
what do they know of life’s hyphen and exclamation?
The Salve of My Heart is Bone-Meal
For months I mourned his loss, the twist fate creates,
copies of his unfinished poems cremated with him,
he, my most gifted student, the one who grieved the large
which is difficult to break down into the comprehensible,
died in Folsom Prison of hepatitis C when all I’d asked of him
was he return to the world a free man as the next chapter
in his splendid evolution, a man become so learned he was nearly
a book, or should I say encyclopedia? His eyes haloed with dark circles
as though sleep vacationed, long lanky form in blue jeans and chambray,
nearly beautiful, fingers of a piano player or perhaps sculptor.
Countless times I entered the prison’s yard, he there in the sally port,
waiting to help me carry in book bags, notepad paper, pencils.
It’s unreasonable some die young, their promise spent to flame,
or why the words of Roethke come back to haunt me,
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
I think of Patrick’s poems as starlings filling the sky, strong
and direct by how they turn their surrounding sounds
into their own calls, which by the way, is how a poem gets written.
Birth-Rights
How many times has a cat eloped with a dog
much to the chagrin of aunts and grandparents alike?
Sometimes a thing festers, all that’s commonplace less so,
the newsfeed more contentious.
The dog might be in her igloo grinding up dream bones,
the cat soaking rays on the chaise.
For all we know or thought we knew
happiness walks barefoot summertime,
arms freely swinging. Don’t be difficult, I tell myself
when attempting to reveal odd possibilities,
that present themselves fresh, easy as plucked basil.
So, when the cat slapped the priest’s signature
onto the marriage certificate, nabbed the dog and flew off
to Honolulu, don’t be surprised that the pilot let each try their hand
(or paw, in this case,) at guiding American Airlines onto the landing strip
where the dark spread out its oilcloth, the cat, a mischievous look,
telling the dog, A peach is a peach because it can’t be an apple.
Dianna MacKinnon Henning has been published in, in part: The Moth, Ireland; Sukoon, Volume 5; Mojave River Review; the New Verse News; Hawaii Pacific Review; Sequestrum; South Dakota Review; Naugatuck River Review; Lullwater Review; The Kentucky Review; Blue Fifth Review; The Main Street Rag; Clackamas Literary Review; 22 wagons by Danijela Trajković, Istok Akademia, an anthology of contemporary Anglophone poetry; California Quarterly; Poetry International and Fugue. Three-time Pushcart nominee. New work due out 2019 in New American Writing, The Kerf. Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several CAC grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Henning’s third poetry book Cathedral of the Hand published 2016 by Finishing Line Press.