The Grace of Light
New Women's Voices Series, No. 27
Finishing Line Press • 2004
Praise for The Grace of Light:
Everything that happens here is informed by the poet's love of the natural world,
its intransigence, its insistence, its beauty—the world that simultaneously consumes us and carries us into ourselves.
—Phebe Davidson, The Journal of New Jersey Poets , Issue 43, 2006
Cover photo by Frank Magalhaes |
Future WildernessTeetertown Preserve, Mountain Farm SectionSomething there is that doesn't love a wall —Robert Frost Above Califon, the timeless blue of a crisp April morning gleams on the pond at Mountain Farm. Higher still along the rocky slope, the trail enters the woods, then travels down the edge of what my map names Future Wilderness. I've come to find this place where the future returns the past. As the path parallels a farmer's fence, the ruined mounds snake among trees. The old neighbors, good or otherwise, are gone, and the cows too. No one has made a friendly game of wall-mending in eighty years. Each freeze and thaw has had its way. No pines or apples grow, but oaks, sycamores, beech, maples and the delicate white dogwoods have crossed the fallen stones to take back ground cleared long ago. The woods are rich again in shadows, riotous with birdsong and the scurry of animals— deep in the mischief of spring. Without our care to wall it out or in, the land relives itself and the wild returns from a time before our fathers ever spoke of fences. |