Feb 152011
 

Here are three poems by three friends, Elaine Handley, Marilyn McCabe, & Mary Shartle, all three part of “the Greenfield Crowd,” a disparate and rowdy group of writers, painters, cellists and cross-country skiers loosely based in Greenfield, NY (though Marilyn McCabe actually lives in Saratoga Springs). Laura Von Rosk and Naton Leslie, who have both appeared on these pages, are part of the group. These three women in particular have combined their talents since 1998 and have produced multiple chapbooks of poetry together, including Notes from the Fire Tower: Three Poets in the  Adirondacks and Glacial Erratica: Three Poets in the Adirondacks, Part Two which won the Adirondack Center for Writing best poetry book award two years in a row. These poems come from their new collection Winterberry, Pine (30 Acre Woods Publications, 2010).

Marilyn McCabe is already familiar to NC readers. We published her Rilke translations earlier on these pages. She has published work in, among others, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Hunger Mountain. Elaine Handley has published in, among others, Dos Passos Review and Connecticut River Review. And Mary Shartle has appeared in Blueline and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.

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A Poem by Elaine Handley


GroundHog Day



Demeter sits at the kitchen window
chain smoking, staring at empty maple and birch.
She imagines the smoke as rage leaving her body.

Outside all that moves are chickadees at the feeder,
only color, winterberries like splatters of fresh blood
in the snarl of grapevines by the shed.

Her husband’s abandoned chamois shirt—frayed
at the cuffs, a hole in one elbow—
provides an odd, familiar comfort these days
so much like the last, the next,
full of his cold emptiness.

It’s been months since Persephone ran off,
stolen by a charming woodchuck, full of pipe
dreams, and she suspects, cruel ways.
“My queen” he called her daughter.
No email, no call, not even a text.  The house
so quiet she can hear the little murmurs
of the sleeping cat.

Some like it hot, she tells herself, thinking
of her daughter, and then the cat,
who inexplicably sleeps under the sizzling woodstove.

On the Today Show that morning, Punxsutawney Phil
was paraded out, fussed over. “What an ass!”
she’d said out loud.  What groundhog comes out
of hibernation early?  Who would willingly give up
the sweet coma of sleep–and for what?
Food hard to find, too much snow, constant cold,
the loneliness.

She pours a bourbon, neat.  It’s her third this morning.
She stubs out the cigarette butt, lights another.
The scald in her throat feels right.
A little blaze flares up in her chest.
For a moment, it almost feels like love.


—Elaine Handley




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