Before There Was Before Poems
letters to the beloved written on egg shells
The beautiful letter drawings in my book were created by my art partner, Connie Saems. In addition to our book collaboration on *Harvest of What Remains, *since 2023 we have been pairing poets with visual artists to have them respond to one another’s work. Seven pairs exhibited at Gallery Twist in Lexington, MA, in May 2024. Here’s the poem I wrote in response to Connie’s eggshells. Thirteen pairs of artists and poets will be exhibiting together with Connie and me at Gallery FiveSparks in June 2026. Visit conniesaems.com to see the full range of Connie’s work.
Grief has written letter after letter
to her beloved, has torn them into strips,
has seamed the broken
words and phrases into and over
hundreds of broken eggshells
from months of morning breakfasts,
covering the brokenness
with the broken
to make a residue
of loss as unreadable
and unquenchable as Grief.
I peer into a shell, strain to read —
OFTLY ESTERDAY NORNUMB—
runes printed in tall thin
block letters, ghost words that ripple
through conjecture and regret,
the cracks between the whys and what ifs.
Grief has tossed for months on shards
of wave-loss until the shells have become bowls
from which Grief drinks
from the no waters, sips
the sea change of bone-dry fragments—
I DON’T SE LETITGO AVEN’T—
Grief has made a way-road,
sacred carvings
along a shoreline
where Grief might find
a place to rest among stones and sand.
In the leaving and leavings, I search hard
through the snipped print,
grieving my own
beloved’s WID NING FIS SURES,
his slow DIS-
AP PEAR ING
—from the exhibit “Not Know” by Connie Saems
. 
. 
“Apology to My Ovaries”
They plucked you out before you could kill me.
I had to make a clean sweep. Forgive me,
conductor of my train to the future—
my artist daughter of long fingers
and kindness, my son with his kilowatt wit
and quiver of dreams. You were my gardener,
my stockpot, my pantry, your shelves
filled with my lifetime supply.
My arbor, predesigned, assigned at birth.
My divine egg timer, my clock that never
needed winding. You were my pinkish-gray,
almond-shaped, and my God, you were brave,
wore menstruation like a brightly flowered dress.
And the bloody labor of your fields.
Your timely hatchery, your drop-down
deliveries, your tubes swaying like anemones.
I, too, thought we could wither together
into gentle senescence. Forgive me
for evicting you in your dotage, not even
a hearing, your desk cleared in an hour,
everything you’d ever carried weighing
just over two ounces. Forgive me,
you who were my wheelhouse, my work
horse, my backfill, my unpaid laborer.
You, who toiled decades deep in the mine of me.
The Birch
“The Birch,” from Before There Was Before, was first published in The Hudson Review. I remembered that the “little brown dog” was on the back of the slipcase, and that the book was Thomas Mann’s Joseph in Egypt. The dog was actually the logo for Alfred A. Knopf. This was the book! Funny how some memories bob back up while others are unrecoverable.
THE BIRCH
I scramble up the slippery trunk. I’m five,
in my own backyard. I fling my one leg,
then the other, hoist myself into the tree.
Then I crack open the shells
of my sunflower seeds, wiggle out
the kernels with the tip of my tongue,
spit the empty shells down to the grass.
I peel bark the way I want to,
the way I peel my scabs to see
the pink skin, the new part underneath,
just born. I watch
clouds scrub the sky. I stay up here
in my brave room until all the fathers
have walked home from the bus stop after work,
carrying the newspapers under their arms,
the streetlights just coming on.
My father is not coming home. He’s left
my mother and me and all
his shirts and his camel’s hair coat
in the hall closet. All his books
on the shelves, even my favorite
with the little brown dog I love
on the cover, his front and back legs
outstretched, running hard.
I’m Reading Darwin
I’ve finally finished reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and wanted to post this poem from my new book, Before There Was Before. I was fascinated to learn that Darwin had planned to become a preacher when he returned from his travels, and like most of his countrymen, believed in the literal words of the bible. He was also appalled at some of the local medical treatments.
I’M READING DARWIN
1
On a tiny rocky island in the Atlantic,
a few months out on the Beagle, Darwin found
only two kinds of birds, the booby and the noddy,
both . . . of a tame and stupid disposition,
easily distracted and deceived—the males
couldn’t stop crabs from snatching
the flying fish they’d left near the nests
for their females. They even let
those crabs steal their chicks.
And on that island, not one plant,
not one lichen, no royal palms succeeded
by majestic plumage, succeeded
by Adam and Eve’s descendants.
Instead, just two dumb birds,
on whose feathers and skin and shit
the life of the island hinged; and a species
of fly that lived on the booby; and a tick
burrowed in noddy flesh; and a small brown moth
that fed on the feathers; and a beetle
and a woodlouse that fed on dung;
and a host of spiders, who fed on them all.
2
In Santa Fé, Argentina, a man splits a bean,
places the moistened bean on his sore head,
and his headache goes away.
A broken leg? Kill and cut open
two puppies, tie them on either side of the leg.
Replace doubt with a plaster!
Did Darwin despair? Or still believe
in a God who would break our chains?
On a dark night, south of the Plata,
he comforted himself with the sea’s
most beautiful spectacle . . . every part
of the surface . . . glowed with a pale light . . .
two billows of liquid phosphorus
before the ship’s bows, and in her wake . . .
a milky train.
Before There Was Before
“Before There Was Before” was first published in the journal Common Ground.
1.
Before there was before, there was still before,
no verb to carry the abyss.
Light from dark, this from that, an easing
of boundaries, a slit
making a run for it,
everything
blue at the edge of that pose.
2.
The Big Bang hurled all the starstuff
ever to be made—brazen tumult,
lashed by the muscle of spume,
hydrogen and helium waiting
for their rings to close,
dark tonnage, billions and billions
of mewling seedstars,
all burning and burning
themselves out, the universe
braced to decay.
3.
The shoulder of one boulder settling
against the shoulder of another.
Canyons cleaving, granite
wrenched free.
The apple asleep
inside the sleeping tree.
4.
The tide slinks in.
Shelves of blue-green algae.
Bluefish.
Lungfish.
Weakfish.
5.
Shaggy-maned mushrooms
sink and dissolve. Beneath,
beetles frill.
Pea vines, holdfast clovers.
Bees shiver the white throats—
Whales slip through the slot.
Baleen and blue milk spilled
through all the rooms of the ocean.
Long lives call and click
the grievous migrations.
Sharp-shinned hawks seize
their trophies, clamping down
the whole lid of air.
7.
When trees come, they are meant to
be climbed.
Stay away, or come, or come
just this far—you and I are
here, the compound of us,
a colossal conjunction.
And the calendulas in the field
who are riddled
with life-spark and flaws.
Let’s take a stab
at the dark, let’s
time our tea,
if we have tea,
if we have time.
