Virginia Nees-Hatlen teaches and directs the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Maine in Orono.  She has published poetry in Stolen Island Review, The Dissident, The Maine Times, Kennebec Review, Dandelion Review, and Reflections on Maine (ed. Margaret Cox Murray).

january

black capped chickadee drops down

beak seeks seed on ground

squirrel too will ravage soon

neither smug in frantic daily labor

in the pitiless cold

a quick and sacred hunger

 

warm under fleece behind the glass

one foot on chair becoming numb

under my thigh joyful i hold still

suspend pity and thought

 

to watch with hungry eyes though

we lack vision through a glass

life is too long too slow to

rush to seize and it drops us

down to earth in an instant

 

the remedy must then come

one seed at a time

 

***

fantasy on the wheel of time


When I look at the blue sky
When a plane's flying high
I wonder if the people in the
        plane can see me…

When I hear the raindrops
I like it better when they stop.
But now I'm wondering if I'll
       wonder on
Or will my wondering stop.

Rosalia Bordallo,  Age 7
Maite, Guam



will be so easy
to disappear
if I just stopped
caring about the young

all the school papers burning 
in the dump
a few notes and stickies attached to
things now removed

to another plane of existence
plenty of parking
from now
on

and golden oldies on 
the radio all of the
time now

just
persist

long enough 

***

Mortality

I am turned down for more life insurance

because Prudential has heard about a Danish

study of a few dozen people with a disease

that I have, and this study

 

shows that people—no, to be precise, it

shows that women--over the

age of 50 who have had the disease for more than

20 years are somewhat more likely to die

than others

 

without it. Statistically, objectively speaking,

that is. And I say I’ll not fail

anymore slowly or quickly or any less inexorably

than the actuary who added up those Danish

ladies’ days. I risk nothing (nothing more than

the usual) to say it.

 

Consider Gertrude, unaffected so far as we know

by my disease, herself a Danish lady of a certain age,

too sick of widowhood too soon,

felled by poison from her second husband,

a death in some ways

easy to predict, dramatically speaking,

 

but very hard for Gertrude herself to see coming,

and surely statistically unlikely--

she blinded by love in the afternoon

as her first husband was deafened and died

nodding off in the warm

afternoon sun, exposed in the

garden as Claudius poured the sure toxin in his

assuredly kingly if not insured ear.

Ah, what was she to Hecuba and vice versa?

 

And I say that Hamlet was wrong not to toast her happiness

and long life with a bit less irony because, after all

the rest is silence, indeed,

and he might have used his time with Mum

to better effect, perhaps.