Marty Williams features 05/21/2018

05/21/2018 Marty Williams hosted by bruce

Oakland poet, Marty Williams's work appears most recently in Atlanta Review, The Heron Tree and Poetry East, as well as in anthologies, Bearing Witness: Poetry By Teachers About Teaching and Winged: New Writing About Bees. With the Bay Area Writing Project and Amherst Writers and Artists, Marty leads writing workshops through Room to Write for writers of all ages. She also co-coordinates the monthly Bay Area Writing Project reading series, Teachers Write – Writers Teach. Marty is currently working on a manuscript, The Forest Within, poems about hometown Oakland, California, and her homeground, Alaska.

 THE CLEARING (FOR MY FATHER)

That year, well before thaw, he cleared

a path through scrub alder and spruce,

halted where the slope flattened out,

drove a stake into the hard ground.

He sunk pilings for a foundation and returned

to build a cabin on the bog. Alone, foot stopped

on the shovel, he heard a loon. Knew the raunch

of bear nearby, outside the circle of light.

Season after season, he left his work in town,

went there to that clearing. Peeled back the trees

with his axe, salted the bog with gravel

from the lakebed. There were summers

full of sawdust and hammers,

wheelbarrow handles cleaved to his palm.

Warm in the snug, square cabin he dreamed a garden

full of flowers and daisies gleamed

bold and white in the evening. Made a home

for themselves there. In the face of the mountain,

on the shore of the lake.

In the afternoon, all wood smoke and gin, he watches

the young birches grow, block the lake from

his view. He sits there, still, into evening,

waiting for the loon or the bear to return.

Gravel sinks, the woodpile falls out of its rows.

Trees creep back into the clearing.