Anne Hunley Trisler is a poet, musician, and songwriter whose work has appeared in Mothering, Struggle, Barbaric Yawp, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine, The Iris Review, Glass Mountain, Dash Literary Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Screamin Mamas and Bad Pony Magazine. A winner of the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing for her poetry and an Eleanora Burke award for her creative nonfiction, she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee. She can be reached at [email protected].---------
Slow Pine
Passing time can break the heart,
the way the day has of going by
while watched from a window,
the distant scene of spring
like needlepoint on a country
cottage wall.
And you are gone,
your certain steps too far to see
as snapdragons climb the trellis
in quiet, steady silence.
I see us
at my feet in blackened strands
of corn silk,
while walking by a rotting oak
in rain-wet woods.
I look for you in living greens,
the reeds and leaves, the stems,
pots of peperomia,
the red anthurium in smooth
teal bowls.
Passing time can break the heart,
the way the night has of returning
the moon,
how it comes to rest
behind the reaching branches
that spread out into the night,
like hands holding nothing.
Song of Seven
Seven times she tried, the mottled sky
was weeping rain, blue-throats sang
her seven songs as hymns of strength
in shadow. Seven times she failed,
the veil still seemed to hang in choking
pearly gathers, lacy mask of white, a bride
she’d never be again. Seven times she said
we need to talk and silences hung low like
seven marmot tails, and seven times
she thought to go but going was a windless
sail inside her soul; she stayed and sang
her song into the craggy-clouded mist.
The night fell fast, the rag-wrung leaves dried
slow in black cool distance. She remembered
wishes made when she was smaller, stronger,
stars she yearned to pull in armfuls to her heart,
and somewhere in the moonlit morning dark
a rose-finch chirped an early tune, the eighth day
dawned, the eighth of June, she softly sang
along, an eighth song-croon.