Baptism/Beth Kephart Poem

The distance between now and then is the ants,
spilled as if from a candy dish
across the wood horizontals of the deck,
and so swiftly organized into cross currents
that I am sent back in time
to the cracked pavement of Ashbourne Hills,
where I sit naked kneed to the sun.

I wear the short pixie hair of a girl
who has not yet come into all her moods.

I have braided the streamers of my brother's new bike.
I have watched him swirl the cul-de-sac
on the balance of two wheels.
I have heard my mother call,
and I am tired out by pride, eyes closed
and socks turned down at the ankle bone,
almost asleep to the dream of a cat nuzzling by.

I am honeysuckle sugar, I am pale, a hollow stem.
The ants are silent, and they come.

I am saved by my own screams,
and by mother's friend. I am lifted up
into Aunt Loretta's arms, carried from the pave,
over the yard, and plunged
into the running-with-water tub of the house
I only just remember the music of.

My dress, my socks, like the black ants drowned.
Something like innocence lost,
something like pride,
except for how, even now,
it is the dream that nuzzles by,

the bend of streaming time,
the distance from then.

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The Cat is Back

I was finishing work on one more corporate magazine story and (almost) finding the energy for the next when I happened to look up and out through my office window, toward the garden that has grown wild with summer rain.

There she was. White, pure, perfect with her imperfectly matched eyes. I reached for my camera, opened the door, thought only to photograph her from afar, but (I swear to you), she turned and began hurtling toward me—zipped through the green with jungle speed and took the porch steps two at a time. She stopped at my feet, closed her eyes, arched up. I lost my fingers in her fur.

There is so much beauty to her. I tell her this and her ears fold back, but she doesn't watch me vainly, doesn't turn her back to me with arrogance as beautiful women sometimes do. She stayed for a long time.

Afterward, she watched me from the deck as I stood in the lamp light of the kitchen window.

To whom does she belong?

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A Ghosts review

The white cat has not been seen since its one long hour near my side. Was she a ghost, I wonder? A spirit? I looked for her earlier on this wickedly hot day while I snapped the weeds from the garden, tamed the trumpet vine. She was nowhere. Not even the float of fur, or the one blue eye.

When I returned to my desk, there was a sweet note from Lauren of Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf, who has lately spent some time with my ghosts. Her gracious review of Nothing but Ghosts is here. Lauren, it's been a heck of a few days over here. I thank you so much for your kindness.

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