Lovers’ Almanac. Angela O'Donnell

      Lovers’ Almanac

      Copyright © 2015 Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      ISBN 13: 978–1-4982–1840-5

      EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-1841-2

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      For Brennan

      Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon, with the old moon in her arms.

      —“Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence”

      For we have seen on our way and fallen in love

      with the world that will pass in a twinkling.

      —Czeslaw Milosz

      Late have I loved you

      Beauty so old and so new

      Late have I loved you.

      —St. Augustine

      Love never fails.

      —St. Paul

      Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared or are forthcoming:

      Alabama Literary Review, “On Finding a Copy of The Wellfleet Whale in Wellfleet”

      “The Song of Things”

      Christian Century, “On Botticelli’s Annunciation”

      “For Shadowment: Villanelle for the Solstice”

      “The Hidden Life”

      “The year begins & love hides hushed”

      Mezzo Cammin, “On Edward Hopper’s ‘A Woman in the Sun’”

      “Betrayal” (formerly, “Diagnosis: Human”)

      “Anniversary Poem”

      “Homing”

      “Monosyllabics”

      Post Road, “Reading Crusoe on the Metro North”

      The Same, “Eurydice’s Song”

      “In-somnia”

      “Wardrobe Advice”

      Spiritus, “Hawk in the Bronx”

      String Poet, “Un-fallen”

      Valparaiso Poetry Review, “Sonnet for St. Sylvia”

      Vineyards, “August 3rd & the Feast of St. Flannery”

      Windhover, “Angelus”

      “Shine”

      Lovers’ Almanac:

      A Sonnet Sequence

      January

      Where do you want to be? she asked.

      Here with you, he answered.

      Here in the brusque wind

      the rattle of the rafters

      of our wood white house.

      Here in the clutch of winter,

      the month young with sun,

      sparse as gleaned fields.

      Here watching the cherry weep,

      waiting for April to come.

      Here where the lean shadows fast,

      the blown birds beckon.

      Where do you want to be? he asked.

      Here with you, I reckon.

      February

      Here with you I reckon

      I can cross the lost world

      and still keep my self, she said.

      Her mother had been dead

      two years the first day

      of the Heart Month,

      her birth month

      now become her dearth month.

      It never goes away,

      she said and sighed—

      then turned back to earth

      and his bright face

      as if all her worth

      lay in his embrace.

      March

      She lay in his embrace

      and he in hers

      when the world broke in.

      The ground woke again

      thrust new shoots into outer air.

      She rose, washed her hair,

      and both became young again.

      They walked the river walk

      as king and queen.

      She missed the other shore,

      the place she’d lived before,

      though in her dreams

      she ran the lake again

      and owned it once more,

      the sky always bluer than it seems.

      April

      The sky never bluer than it seems

      in easy spring,

      Easter white and bird-egg blue.

      My gift is me to you,

      she said the date she’d

      been born. What’s yours to me?

      she smiled. The cherry wept

      blooms in the yard. He kept

      her gift in a box of thought.

      Not a thing that could be bought—

      a year without a fight,

      dinner every night,

      each day a new start,

      a wild heart.

      May

      A wild heart rules the month of May,

      the boy-girl, maypole-dancing days,

      the ancient pulse of germ and birth,

      in the ground and in the blood.

      Leave the safety of the hearth,

      drown your dry life in the flood.

      Farewell breath of autumn’s being.

      Welcome sweetly earth’s new greening.