Deborah Gaines

Deborah Gaines' career as a writer has run the gamut, from Nancy Drew mysteries to a long-running travel column for the New York Post. She has recently returned to poetry, her first love. 

Consolation

Yesterday I walked for miles

on the trail that was our favorite

singing love songs to the dog

that you once sang to me.

She licked my hand

as a chipmunk skittered across the path

disturbing last year’s fallen leaves.

The island of grief

grows smaller in the distance

but never disappears.

Battenkill River 1985

How could I know

that the sharp shock of hitting cold water

naked, a little drunk,

with shivers rippling like tiny earthquakes

through my 24-year-old body,

on a sun-dappled afternoon

in the deep woods south of Lake George,

would become a memory I cherished

for forty years?

Or that the black-haired,

sinewy young woman holding my hand

as we jumped in that river

would become my most precious friend,

not letting go

until cancer snapped her bones

twenty years later?

Maybe this memory will be with me

when my breath leaves my body

for the last time. If so,

should I have honored it differently?

Or was it enough to be young and careless,

breathless and laughing

with embarrassment and joy?

Everything Evaporates

I am mostly water, but I am drained.

Creaky, where I once was fluid.

Stuck in place, where once I flowed.

Parched in the throat, where a liquid voice once rose.

These days, birds no longer come to visit me.

My upper arms are dunes of crepey sand.

But water nourishes my Japanese eggplant.

It lies dreaming in still pools that attract mosquitos.

Water has no direction, but is never lost.

It isn’t insecure, depressed, or suicidal.

It filled the bathtub where my brother died.

But I don’t think we can blame it for that.

Virginia Woolf told her husband she heard voices.

She stuffed her coat with stones and drowned in the River Ouse.