….
Watercolor
Spider webs fill the space between
parallel power lines dripping mist,
their geometry visible from the road
beside a pasture.
You could pull off to look
if the citified farmer had not
built a fence which you cannot see
but know is there.
You know a curve is there too
and a stop sign and birds singing
to announce their presence in trees
draped with fog.
Your mother kept flowered teacups
you might have treasured on a whatnot
you dusted each Saturday morning,
cups and whatnot now long gone.
But, like spider webs, fence, and birds,
they do not matter.
The visible world is, after all, merely visible—
what you can remember, imagine, pass on
but never own.
……
This poem is from the chapbook Washed and Dried by Nancy Swanson (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/washed-and-dried-by-nancy-swanson/ .
The narrator of Washed and Dried speaks from a foggy road, a lighthouse, the flowerbed in front of her ghostly home, a midstream rock, the desert, a childhood steeped in the south. The result is a series of recollections on family, change, and loss. Readers will recognize the hero and main character, who emerges in real, imaged, and perilous states: hurricane, pools, rising seas, creeks and rivers, canals, mist, mud puddles, flakes of snow.
Nancy Swanson is a child of the South, explorer, parent, student of nature, and long-standing teacher who found poetic voice in her own classroom. Her work has been published by Broad River Review, Chattahoochee Review, Comstock Review, English Journal, Kakalak, North Carolina Literary Review, and South Carolina Review, among others.
After living on Maui for two years, she and her husband retired in western North Carolina. There she was awarded the Sideny Lanier Poetry Prize, judged by George Bilgere. In 2023, she won second place in the James Applewhite Poetry Contest. Washed and Dried is her first published collection.
The Paddock Review 