Deborah Finch was born and raised in San Jose, California and now resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she makes her living as a research biologist and technical writer. Experiences with the natural world during her youth in California have been a primary influence. Her poetry has been published in literary journals such as Avocet, Owen Wister Review (OWR), Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, Melic View, Avocet, FZQ, Steel Point Quarterly, Mentress Moon, The Dragonfly Review, 3rd Muse, 2River View, Salt River Review, Poems Niedergnasse, Creekwalkder Magazine, and others. She won first place in the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Press Association Journal Competition for poems published in OWR.
Interested readers will find more work by Deborah Finch at the following on-line locations:
2 River View http://www.daemen.edu/pages/rlong/tworiver/2RView/5_3/
3rd Muse Poetry Journal http://www.3rdmuse.com/journal/issue6/index.html
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside http://www.rt66.com/~sfpoetry/finch.html
I know that the darkness
I know that.
And now she trots softly
I stay where she left me.
behind that doe
is really me.
away through the trees
without ever seeing
her darkness.
My longing to be her
branches into shadows
of pine trees.
Shut, their thin faces
In the studio above,
Each shelf slumps with the dogged air
I have seen their backs sagging,
an ashamed, I’ve turned away.
For then,
lean together like old, stuffed dolls
or rifles rusting to the walls,
locked in a dusty alliance.
a needle scratches at the soul of Brahms.
His lullaby limps downstairs:
frail, old man in underwear.
of a park bench. As I reach
to take a book, the row contracts
like a spinster asked to dance.
palms fall in dark, suede gloves
to the dust on a wooden chair;
I’ve felt their dry skins curl and flake
The owner blinks behind bifocals.
He is waiting for bells to jing-a-ling,
the door to shut against me.
the parched old sacks suck air,
hearts drink blood and pump again.
Miles away, the Rosicrucian Museum
awakens to voices whirling like smoke
and mummies cry out
and sit upright.
I fish inner seas
Plucking me
Moans rise
But dawn opens
Love dons plumage,
Goodbye fills your fist
my childhood made,
head under water,
rump tipped up.
You yank my tail.
from Trinidad,
you towel me off,
rubbing my breasts
until feathers erupt.
like squalling gulls.
Vowels foam with soul.
Tides of your eyes
wash starfish up.
underwings. I try
them on and see myself.
Gulls circle mirrors
in bathrooms I turn in.
wades jetties,
flies to distant piers,
molting soft breast down
in shoals where you wade.
with its gray tail
of feathers, flushing
from boundaries where
seas end in waves.
Oaks climb ravines,
Above me two kinglets dash,
What a joy to be wanted
Then, weeks pass. Biking one day,
grasping light’s passing fingers.
They crawl down to creeks
scraping knees, clutching banks.
Shawl fringes of moss hang
from arms raised to perch on.
And warmed by sun’s embers,
I lie drifting, face up.
dart like a cat’s eyes
back and forth among leaves
crisply jeweled with green veins.
How perfectly this pair
of crown-dwelling songbirds
weave their tight thimble nest
of lichens, fur, webs.
Scissoring beaks thread
orange streaks of dusk in,
and now and again - Look!
the ruby-crowned one
flits to a twig, flings
garlands of sound wide,
defending turf bigger
than a Pueblo to nest in.
His strands of song sparkle
with quartz and cut-glass
strung loosely with topaz
and trilling bell-chimes.
It sails past barbed wire, circles
dozens of oaks, enclosing
squirrels, parks, and schoolyards,
and me, my blue bike.
by kinglets! They line feathers,
weave snatches of mist
in their cup. Pedaling home,
I feel rallied by nature’s
insistence. That night,
my dreams invoke Artemis.
She spreads clouds, stellar veils,
silken moon over nests, calling
“Oaks! Keep your squirrels out! ”.
we hear fuss up a canyon.
Parting leaves, we flush scrub jays,
find warm naked chicks,
their bodies four puffs of dough
pressing pan boundaries.
And grown kinglets are sparks
shooting high from tree crowns,
mobbing us, nabbing lime-green
nymphs, cramming swallowtails
into gapes so wide
my daughter’s wonder
metamorphosizes
from larvae into dragonflies.
Curling like question-marks,
they hover over mouths,
dipping down until wings rip,
and darkness devours them.
On the ferry to Tiburon, my daughter asked,
The one who didn’t keep me, she said,
He died, I murmured to nearby Alcatraz,
Thoughts of my father swim in my mind,
reeling the whale of my shadow self in.
That was before I learned to sail, he sighs,
A whipping wind from his fatherless life
I ask myself, who was this man, this sailboat dad,
He sailed his family without sea charts,
with the tide of vodka sloshed on rocks,
Who was this man who shouted “Swim!”
of the D&H machine shop, weekdays
whose hot pan singed each flagging fin
Who was this dad whose wife left him
I sail by the stars your eyes flick on,
Who was this dad, this sailboat man
surrounded by strangers whose names were
I never realized just how much ash
of his own Pacific Ocean. His ash
The ash in my fists was my dad,
when she learned her ex was dead.
Wheat grew by the look in my grandad’s eyes,
Who was my father? Which father, I said,
the one who is Dad? Or the other?
who left me with the Valentine dress
that you hid like a gun in the cedar chest.
he put a bullet in his head. And in her blue eyes,
his raft capsized, drowning young hope, and him.
sounding blue depths with sonar songs.
His voice in my daydream pulls on a line,
I was a baby when my father left, he says,
and sixteen when I found my young mom dead.
before I married your mother, before she left
me just like my father deserted his family.
fills the canvas sheets of my emptiness.
With my daughter here on the ferry deck,
whose cocktails splashed and dove like seals
in the cove where he anchored late at night?
until Velella ground on a bar and sank.
Alviso’s channel flushed and swelled
washing him out of the slough he knew
into a tilting, green sea of no family.
as he kissed my brothers off his dock?
They flopped like fish in the slop and guts
slapping oily parts, dust of metal shavings.
Sunday, sunny sides fried by the sky
while the spatter of sun burned lidless eyes,
blistering visions of lives that swim.
to salvage the sons he abandoned?
He said, you’re the one I love, to me,
yet he left me nothing but words in sand.
Can’t make it, he wrote on the day I wed.
who left me lurching on Half Moon Bay
in the bowels of a nameless fishing boat
Finch? Left me with his other wife Fran
whose hands held millions of flakes of him.
one man could make, how my arms ached
as we threw fistfuls into the fog and wind
got in my eyes, made them smart and swim.
Mike said, Glad to see you can finally cry.
the ash in my fists was my father,
he was the color of my mother’s face
He was the stubble of his father’s fields
invaded by cheatgrass in Idaho.
Aunt Dorothy on his knee -- before his wife
had six more kids, before she bore my father.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway2001. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Deborah Finch.
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