By Elizabeth Austen
…my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.
—Jane Kenyon
How many summer afternoons found us
at this lakeshore, unable to account
for our fate? Dear whirligig,
you want what is only possible
with stillness. We have yet to learn the names
of nearly everything we love. These
tiny birds in the yellowing lilac—who are they?
Branch to branch—in search of what?
Each winter we earn the next summer’s light
until—not yet—it arrives unannounced:
our last. From the corner of an eye
we’ll see—not yet—how perfect and brief
our bodies were—how even one afternoon
of lakewater and sunlight, the girlchild
splashing in the shallows, the laughter
carried from a far shore—
how even this was enough, seen
from the diminishing vista of a rearview mirror.
*******
Copyright Austen 2012
Elizabeth Austen 's poems -- almost all of them -- in her debut poetry collection, Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011), were drafted or revised on an island, though she lives in West Seattle. She’s written at the Whiteley Center on San Juan, at the Artsmith residency on Orcas and at Hedgebrook and friends’ homes on Whidbey.
She’s also the author of two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet (one of four winners of the 2010 Toadlily Press chapbook award and part of the quartet Sightline). Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, and in journals including the Los Angeles Review, Bellingham Review and Willow Springs. She was the Washington “roadshow poet” and is the literary producer for KUOW 94.9 public radio. Find her online at elizabethausten.org.
All work by Elizabeth Austen
