Dorinda Wegener
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Dorinda Wegener was brought home from Portsmouth Naval Hospital to a tiny apartment on Thornton Street, “Nutfield”, NH – Robert Frost’s first Derry residence prior to his Frost Farm. Since then, poetry continues to enrich her life. She has published in Salamander, The Worcester Review, The Larcom Review, Ceide (Ireland), and forthcoming in The Marlboro Review. Her work has been displayed at Harvard University’s Lamont Library. Her poem “Thaw”, placed second in The Worcester County Poetry Association Contest as judged by Jeffrey Harrison. Dorinda has read with Tapestry of Voices, Stone Soup Poets, and the Brookline Booksmith Series. She has been an assistant editor for The Summer Home Review Vol. I & II. Her first manuscript, All I’s and O’s, is a quartet of retrospection, invention, transience, and identity.
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A Map Back Home
A girl drifts along the corridors of her body, and wonders
If she knows how to open her right atrium
With blood, there is always something at the threshold:
A lung, an eye, a breast bone suffocating, but what
of a second cut grain or the braided fingers
of strawberry vines- the girl recalls the clay
lamp she sculpted in Sunday School; how
the burning was symbolic of something lost
from patchwork quilt to basement root cellar-
the small, dank pit – a womb: her map begins
here. She turns new lamps from tuber skins –
hangs one at each lymph node, vessel valve. She
illuminates every statue of Christ, every winter home.
To be in the map and of the map: She
moves by visceral touch with infrared heat;
yet on nights when the wind bleats and the axe
still contacts the block, she oscillates between
light and milk, life and death: drifting,
but it is hers to drift. Hers to drift –
Four Fields
Every winter, home
to the farm taken by marsh
thistle and wineberry. At the silo door,
the family eidolon absolves me
my stalk-paper and indelible ink. A lifeline
borne from the tureen of their eyes –
cold soup, skinned
*
My sister is always a rabbit.
My other, a grizzly.
I am a black swan, nested.
Survival is the dream
of a cicada midair,
a mass for the lost moon.
*
Here is the first of forty days:
the crop rent by runnels and sidereal
time. Mother, in early spring for her spade
riven by rocks, is found
clay-clad and weeping –
What is blood among blood?What are locusts from the hand of God?*
In his Sunday suit, the oldest
son remains plot-side.
My brother.
He is music not of the hand.
He is our father’s headstone and glass decanter
raised to the ergot sheaves,
rose to the lip of the wind.
Homestead
The wind tugs the sweet gale; the pepperbush bobs in the thicket.
Ice thaws in the brook out back –
mud-fossil footprints where the child ran,learnt the ways of serpent and bee.These were my fields.March-bog where I nursed the lack
of barn swallows nested in rafters, away –
Why does winter return me?
To old, gray snow; white paint, ill and peeling –
They have remodeled the front barn and the silo, clean gone.Sentimentality – my small enchanter’s
nightshade, you cliff seep my bones; leave me –
these were my fields.The jolt-April breeze disturbs; there should be no fear in this plot.
I am no longer that wild button bush
