Ginny Hoyle
Contest - 2nd Place
Ginny Hoyle’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, MARGIE, Pilgrimage, Wazee and elsewhere. She collaborates with Colorado artist Judy Anderson to create freeform artist books and installations. Examples of their work are held in numerous fine arts collections, including Stanford, Scripps College, and Baylor. She works in Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a sort of volunteer bone librarian and she’s a member of Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
How to Breathe
I.
I want to strip my life clean, reduce my stuff
to bare essentials—a tree in winter
at winter’s end, a cliff above a white sea.
Make that a white cliff, swallows wheeling,
and let the high priest of morning
sing up the sun.
Make it Millay’s West Country sun
with her lark in air and that song
clean through me
and Millay’s West Country cry—
What have I done with what was dearest to me?
It is not here.
II.
Everyone gets a key to the garden,
a stone seat big enough for one
worn smooth by longing.
III.
Called to the window by petals leaping,
morning breeze. No words
soft enough to say
how this delicate infusion,
a teaspoon of violet dissolved
in an empty sky,
alters the intake of breath.
I bow my head
and look into my heart:
open door
patch of sky
and the wind moves through.
I want to strip my life clean, reduce my stuff
to bare essentials—a tree in winter
at winter’s end, a cliff above a white sea.
Make that a white cliff, swallows wheeling,
and let the high priest of morning
sing up the sun.
Make it Millay’s West Country sun
with her lark in air and that song
clean through me
and Millay’s West Country cry—
What have I done with what was dearest to me?
It is not here.
II.
Everyone gets a key to the garden,
a stone seat big enough for one
worn smooth by longing.
III.
Called to the window by petals leaping,
morning breeze. No words
soft enough to say
how this delicate infusion,
a teaspoon of violet dissolved
in an empty sky,
alters the intake of breath.
I bow my head
and look into my heart:
open door
patch of sky
and the wind moves through.
“ I just happened to have some ‘How To’ poems on hand when I learned about this contest, so I thought—well, it can’t hurt to try. I hope I’ll remember that. ”
How to Know Your Heart
I saw my heart today, four valves, four tongues
lapping up the stuff of life, endless flow, insatiable thirst.
Don’t talk, the tech said, so I lay still and let the world move
through me: footsteps in the hall, doors that open, doors that close.
Such a crude machine, this muscled pump,
it doesn’t love, it works, one stroke over and over.
The bed is hard. The gown is thin. The room is cold.
I entered this world a mere child—a terrible lapse in judgment.
So don’t expect me to be logical now, steeped as I am in memory—
scent of earth, mid-summer air, one finch
on a small branch, grooming. Behind a locked gate
a blue pool beckons.
How quickly light steals across the courtyard,
cobble by cobble, packing heat.
lapping up the stuff of life, endless flow, insatiable thirst.
Don’t talk, the tech said, so I lay still and let the world move
through me: footsteps in the hall, doors that open, doors that close.
Such a crude machine, this muscled pump,
it doesn’t love, it works, one stroke over and over.
The bed is hard. The gown is thin. The room is cold.
I entered this world a mere child—a terrible lapse in judgment.
So don’t expect me to be logical now, steeped as I am in memory—
scent of earth, mid-summer air, one finch
on a small branch, grooming. Behind a locked gate
a blue pool beckons.
How quickly light steals across the courtyard,
cobble by cobble, packing heat.