Poems by Louise Barden
See My Work
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| Contact Me Louise Barden 1501-G Lansdale Drive Charlotte, NC 28205 Phone: 704-535-1005 Fax: 704-535-6385 E-mail: louise@lbarden.com |
Sow's Ear – Winter 2004 Looking For Jeffers’ Housethe night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality. Hurt Hawks
Nothing was what I expected, not the tiny cottage crushed on every side among suburban stucco houses, not the stone tower. It was short, stolid independence almost eclipsed by shingled rooftops everywhere. Even the Pacific glimmered, faint between an angled maze of walls, too quiet and too far away to match the scene in my imagination. Naturally, there were no hawks.
We had threaded a mire of velvet golf courses, walled and landscaped millionaire estates looking for a painting by El Greco. What we found was Norman Rockwell. We parked the car, wandered up and down the sidewalk empty-handed until a dog's wild barking drove us away.
The next morning as fog lifted from an untamed rocky point, I looked across the bay for where we'd been. Surely it was no trick of sight when the tower rose among the houses as he said it would, and a shadow, dark and blinding, skimmed the waves.
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Sow's Ear – Winter 2004 Potter’s ShopIt’s the practice, she says. I caress a polished bowl big as a table top, perfectly round and even, emerald expanse lush with gigantic flowers. My husband taps its rim lightly, the touch you save for crystal. Feel he commands. My fingers vibrate on the far circumference. . She frowns. People ask how long it took to make this. I say “two weeks. And 25 years.” Those years it took to raise our son. My husband lifts his hand, turns to stare at mugs, bowls, vases, plates -- rows of bare clay drying, surfaces prepared for heat, finished colors set in fire and gleaming for those prepared to pay and take them home.
Some people say I charge too much. Will they be wearing the same shoes in twenty years when my mug still holds their coffee? I wander to the shelf of seconds, flawed and brilliant. My husband’s gaze meets mine. We have bought this weekend in the mountains to learn each other’s thoughts again. We stray toward the door.
Come back when you are shopping, she says and turns to make a pot of tea, start her wheel. On the outside path through her tangled patch of daisies, mint, impatiens, our hands touch. Ripe blueberries spill across a split rail fence.
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in A Rough Sort of Beauty ( Univ. of Ark. Press)
If Gravity Should Fail
On this mountain ridge, we camp at the lip of the world, lean back in grass to feel how a tilt of earth could make us slip from our solid peak and spill into the dome of starry dark. It would be an easy way to leave this land, rising like a spark above our rock-ringed blaze, retrieved by God straight into his heaven. We have already half forgotten life in those narrow valleys almost hidden by spreading fog below. The grief of ordinary days fades, expires, and we are pulled by night’s cold fires.
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in Chattahoochee Review and Tea Leaves (1996)
River Travel
The summer after we married when our jobs disappeared and left us with no place to live for weeks we loaded bread and dried beef in your Dad's dented canoe and headed down the wild part of the Buffalo even though the season was wrong and the water low.
With days feathered out before us we drifted like leaves through July heat, empty pastures and woods, stopping at each curve to crack open the bindings of your new guides to wildlife, add discoveries to your list. Fat-lipped Monkeyflowers, Mimulus alatus. Vervain, verbena stricta. Snowy egrets in the shallows. A pair of ruby-throated hummingbirds, he leading, she following. At one sharp bend, we floated in the shadows of a limestone wall eating peanut butter sandwiches, then scrambled up to look for caves. Farther on it was Wild Senna, False Pimpernel, a giant bullfrog. Now and then a cabin on the bank.
Evenings we camped on gravel bars, stirred soup and rice over driftwood flames, watched stars pierce velvet, and crouched beside black water scrubbing smoke from a Boy Scout mess kit. Cicadas rattled above a whisper of cars crossing distant bridges. After a row of nights spent on river-polished rocks, the evening we lay on sand felt soft.
Years later I still see mornings opening like phlox on the banks, sometimes feel sun loosen my shoulders, knotted with pulling a paddle over and over. I remember how often the clear stream spread out, leaving us within inches of the bottom, how when the river wouldn't carry us to the next pool, we stepped into the brief shock of cold and walked.
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