V E R S E ❦ I M A G E

[with two poems by Lola Haskins]

I sat in the ophthalmologist’s office reading Lola Haskins and wondering. I’ve put off this visit due to COVID and I’m overdue, seeing Dr. Bondalapati for the first time. She is new here, just moved to Elkin from Chapel Hill with her family last summer. Most of her staff I’ve known for years, although it is still welcoming to be recognized behind the mask.

All of us masked. Wondering. Are our precautions enough? Is it OK to be together like this?

Isn’t it remarkable how much eyes alone can communicate? Eyebrows bobbing, winky lids, wrinkly skin of brow and temple, lovely corrugator muscles. I left the office happy to have seen my new doctor and Deanna, Karen, all the others.

Bridge the separations. Make community. Take nothing for granted.

I am also restored and innervated by Lola Haskins’s poems. I heard her read several years ago and just bought her collection, how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016). Isn’t it remarkable how much a few words and a few lines alone can communicate? Seeing through another’s eyes. Another’s voice in my ears . . .

. . . like happiness // it materialized so gradually / that I never even for a moment // saw it coming

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The Cabin at Fakahatchee Strand

by morning the water has turned such
silver I want to put it on i know

it would only flutter off my skin
like a bird too quick to follow

but i don’t care i want it anyway
and i want that tangle of cattail

and black rush too the way i want
to be perpetually waking to

yet another gift like the single gator
stretched out on the muck

where pond has begun to thicken
to swamp like happiness

it materialized so gradually
that i never even for a moment

saw it coming

.

Lola Haskins, from how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016)

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Flight

if i eat feathers asks the child
will i be able to fly?

you already can says her mother
any night
the lightness in you my lift you
from your cot
that’s why i close the windows

when i get old enough the child
wonders

will you open them? oh yes
comes the answer

(sorrowing) that’s what
mothers do

.

Lola Haskins, from how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016)

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Haskins writes with the startling freedom and grace of a kite flying, and with the variety and assurance of invention that reveal, in image after image, the dream behind the waking world.
W.S.Merwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former U. S. Poet Laureate

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