Carol Deering – 3 poems

TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

A moth roiling witchy at the window
my mind whirling
the moon at 3 a.m. looming closer
hunchbacked, absorbed

                celestial navigation…

What gets this moth so keyed up,
to dance so noisily? show no mercy?
What winds me up a slope         

                angular relationships…

when I want to spin
from the sharp edge of thought
into lazy swells
of sleep?

REMINISCENCE

This jacquard-patterned river,
pulling up its socks, tripping,
scampering, leaping shadows,
plays with threads of light, running
tiptoe, allegretto con moto,
jaunty
with all its might.

The snow on the edge glows blue
and ponderous,
all the full moon
long…

IN THE  NIGHT FOREST

lost, returning late,
looking up through the understory,
up through the depths
of black water
to the fossils and the undead
stars

with friends at a jukebox
playing It’s a Beautiful Morning
at midnight
must get back
to camp

I can’t see
for the darkness,
sounds start and stop
invisibly, eyes
grip a sliver of stars
that curves as trees

let me by.

Carol L. Deering grew up in New England but has lived in Wyoming for 30 years. She has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016 and 1999). Last year she won the Wyoming Writers free-verse contest. Her poetry appears in online and traditional journals, and is forthcoming in Soundings Review and Written River. Carol also has poems in the regional anthology Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region. Once she had the privilege of interviewing Richard Hugo; that interview, published by Art Notes (Columbia Basin College), was reissued in CutBank.