Anne Britting Olsen- Three Poems

Anne Britting Oleson has been published widely on four continents.  She earned her MFA at the Stonecoast program of USM.  She has published two chapbooks, The Church of St. Materiana (2007) and The Beauty of It(2010). A third chapbook, Counting the Days, is forthcoming from Pink Girl Ink, and a novel, The Book of the Mandolin Player, is forthcoming from B Ink Publishing--both in early 2016.

Absence

Rocking chair, gentle rhythmic echo

against creaking hardwood, unforced,

dying away, no more keeping time

to a breath driven out. Silent drift

of snow against a window, hum

of old overhead lighting, distant,

dictating nightfall, urgency moving on,

leaving the sound of watchfulness.

Singing School

     (for Rowan)

We are the voices of the lanes

and the rough tracks,

the footpaths sign-posted and not,

where we find our way

or find ourselves lost.

We are the songs of long treks

up Winchester Hill or past chalk horses,

through nettles or bare-boled trees,

churchyards of leaning stones

with grasses left long for butterflies.

We sing of pints in Soberton,

of wooden stiles and kissing-gates,

of brick Victorian bridges

and rusty gaslight fixtures

along a long-abandoned railbed.

Our harmonies are laughter beside water:

at the source of the Meon,

along the mud banks of the Thames,

in a pub beside Noss Creek.

Our music is each other. Our music is joy.

Train

At the crossing, barrier down,

the red eyes of warning lights

open and close to a cacophony

of jangling bells. Count the engines.

Four—a freight train going far

or pulling much. Count the cars:

flatbeds, empty, or full of uncut pulp;

boxcars, doors closed secretively

or open in defiance of the strictures

painted on their sides. Tankers

haul all manner of toxins through

the tiny veins and tiny muscular towns

of the country's circulatory system.

Cars from Minnesota or New Mexico

or Louisiana, coupling and breaking apart,

a body with no heart, but always

pumping, pushing this life through

this crossing where I wait every afternoon,

at 3:40, counting, where I imagine myself

swinging up beside the grey-faced driver

who raises his hand in a bored greeting

as he rattles over the rails.