Rose Black features 3/6/17

3/6/2017  Rose Black    hosted by Jan
(Need a prompt? "Drink Coupon"  -- you don't have to use those words.)

Rose Black lives and works by the railroad tracks in East Oakland. With their mountain dogs, 
Basho and Dante, she and her husband operate Renaissance Stone, a studio and supply source 
for stone sculptors. Rose's poetry has been widely published, and she is the author of three books,
Clearing, Winter Light, and Green Field. Her first two books, Clearing and Winter 
Light, are included in Yale's Beinecke Library for the Yale Collection of American Literature.

Rose currently teaches poetry at Salinas Valley State Prison. Her extensive article about the poetry
workshop there, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is featured in Red Wheelbarrow, 2015, literary

magazine.

Silver Spring             

When the rains come in early spring, water seeps up through the basement floor, murky and foul. It creeps into corners, flows under the washing machine, under the old gas stove, across the mud sill into the plant room, and under the crooked door that leads outside.

The old woman hobbles down to the basement with a long-handled mop. She mops the floor, wrings the water into buckets, then pours it all down the cast iron sink.

She cannot keep up. Soon the water is to her ankles. Outside,  the water swells into little rivers. At its lowest point, the yard itself begins to fill, and a pond appears, then slowly spreads across the grass.

Underneath it all, the silver spring, for which her neighborhood is named, will continue to wind its way under everyone's floors and basements, rising and falling like the breath of the earth and its oceans.

Her neighbors try to divert the unwanted water this way and that, away from themselves. The old woman rests her mop against the wall, opens her arms, says, Come. 

                                                                                 Rose Black