Kathryn Howd Machan – String Poet

HER FATHER’S GHOST

2013 String Poet Prize Honorable Mention
I won’t begin to tell you I’m a dream
of sloping hill, wild strawberries, a small
dark cat high-leaping over grass where stream
runs clear and cold from glacial spring. I’m all
you’ve ever needed, nothing more, high sun
a warmth on face and arms and hands as tongue
delights in crimson, perfect sweetness one
can taste as life’s pure truth when time is young.
Old age? You have it now as I once did
when I taught you the music of tall trees,
the dance to find good mushrooms shadows hid,
a way of seeing only longing frees.
I have no need to tell you that my death
became the poems you write, your blood, your breath.

Katharyn Howd Machan is the author of 30 published collections, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense. She is a full professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in central New York State. In 2012 she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press).