November 19th, 2021
Two Poems
by Kasha Martin Gauthier
A Poet Homeschools, Week 2: Biology
With each footfall,
blood courses to your brain.
Can you feel it?
*
Pinch the nerve to make it grow.
Your grandfather pinched
springtime buds from the coreopsis—
thought he was deadheading them.
Try not to confuse living with dying.
*
The doctors don’t know
how he’ll react to the morphine,
or the strength it took to ask for it.
They don’t know how
he still knows our names.
Scientists don’t know
how one error
on one synapse
can kill a man.
No one knows
why we live at all,
or why we die.
*
Cornflowers and goldenrod
appear and disappear on roadsides
without the hand of humans.
We notice life, finally,
in the turn of autumn
as we speed by—
an empty space
where gold was given away.
-After Mary Oliver
Kasha Gauthier reads “A Poet Homeschools, Week 2: Biology”:
Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore, Late Winter
Here at the edge of the world,
Dad is still dead. At the edge of the world
waves advance—soldiers in formation,
across a frigid, glossy plain. Smoothed rocks
assemble at tide’s last line to battle the swells
back to where they belong. At world’s edge,
things make sense: magic and pattern synchronize.
There are no bright lines at the edge of the world.
Small dramas swirl in gullies.
Animals may exist somewhere.
World’s edge, seen from space
is a thin, undulating line—not a harsh margin—
not the difference between living or drowning.
There are no warning signs
that tell me how to escape
a rip current, that the shuttle doesn’t run
in winter, that Lot 3 is open for business.
The edge of the world leaves it to me
to figure out—Dad’s still dead.
I cry out to the waves—
I beg the frigid edge: Please—
take him from me and bury him
there with you! Take him—
and carry him on your crests, forevermore.
But the bitter gale took only my voice—
reminding me:
at the edge of the world,
ice always wins, wind always wins—
and rocks will yield their ground,
smoothing each other as they go.
Kasha Gauthier reads “Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore, Late Winter”:
Kasha Martin Gauthier lives outside Boston with her family. A member of PoemWorks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets, Kasha’s work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Pangyrus, Constellations, The Healing Muse, Slipstream, and Soundings East. Kasha’s poetry is informed by her family dynamics, upbringing in New Hampshire, and careers in business and cybersecurity.
Photo by Kasha Martin Gauthier