Mary Pelletier
Stats
Pastime trenz pruca
Hometown seattle, washington
job photographer
interests landscape, portrait, travel
Poem Titles
> THE PLACES BETWEEN
> Little Broken Things
THE PLACES BETWEEN
Tonight the poet
Told of the between places
Where there is not fluid or firm
Not sea or sand
But a tide line
Where appears odd stuff
An old shoe or a perfect shell
Where there is not sleeping or waking
But the delivery place
Of a cast off dream
Of the dreamer within.
I returned home
Still wrapped in the magic
Of shifting real to not real
And in warming the bedtime hot milk
The creamy whiteness bubbled over
Cascading through the hidden parts of the clean stove
To chide the striving housewife within me.
In that margin between art and housewifery
I discovered the milk’s poem:
White fluid, changed limpid to alive,
Surged up, an expanded self
To escape the confining pot
A moving white foam mountain
Created by more heat than mere milk could accept.
I sponged up the cooling white,
Hurried off to bed
To dream of the tide line
And to find the poet’s gift
Cast there
Between fluid and firm.
________________________________
Little Broken Things
At the back of the closet
Once again
I come upon
The small cardboard box
With the see-through plastic lid.
Once again
My eyes drink in
All the old beautiful pain
Of some little broken things
That were sent back to me
After the accident.
Here is my old black-corded watch
Which she had loved to wear,
Its gold rim surrounding hands
Always at almost half-past seven.
Here, a bent pin with its broken clasp
And a small tarnished silver ring.
In a still fragrant cosmetic jar
Are a few of her long blond hairs
I had salvaged, all those years ago,
From the nap of a dark sweater.
Quickly, I put back into the closet
These tawdry remains
Of a gone and glorious life
And, standing tall and straight,
Move bravely
Into a new and empty day.
