* First published in The Wetlands, Cascadia Community College's
Creative Arts Journal, 2005. Reprinted in Crosscurrents, 2005.
Denise Calvetti Michaels
Denise Calvetti Michaels writes poetry and memoir and her poems are published in Crosscurrents, Paterson Literary Review, Wetlands Review, Literary Mama, King
County Poetry on Buses, Poets Against the War, Cambium Press, and PoetsWest. Her work is also included in Mute Note Earthward, published by Washington Poetry
Association, 2004; In Praise of Fertile Land by Whit Press, 2003, and The Milk of Almonds, Italian American Woman on Food and Culture, Feminist Press, 2002. In 2004, Denise was awarded the Crosscurrents Prize for poetry by the Washington State Humanities Association for Community Colleges and Technical Colleges. She has new poems forthcoming in San Diego City Works Press; and in the anthology--Between Sleeps: the 3:15 experiment 1993-2005. Mother to three daughters and grandmother, to Holden, Calder and Maizie, Denise lives in Kirkland,Washington and teaches psychology at Cascadia Community College in Bothell. She is a member of the Creative Arts Club and supports students with creative writing. She received a BA in English from the University of South Florida and earned an MA in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College. Her thesis explores the practice of journal writing as a tool for reflection and growth for child care providers. For several years she worked for King County and the State of Washington to improve access for families to quality, culturally relevant child care. In 2001 Denise and her colleagues at the King County ChildCare Program were recipients of the Dr. Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award. You can find more about Denise by visiting
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
- Walt Whitman
Highway One, Spine of Memory
--for Ken Claire, 1946-1968
Before you left for Vietnam
you came by
on the motorcycle
to ask if I'd go for one last ride.
We forgot to wear the helmets
to cross the Pacific Coastal range,
Sequoias blanched in light
and reaching for us,
we thought, but did not say.
Only the wind we heard
when we left the groves
for San Gregorio, Half Moon Bay,
where the waves continue, today,
revising this shore,
where the sandpipers persist, today,
stitching the ocean's hem.
* First published in Voices in Wartime, 2005
In the Cascade Mountains, Late in the Year
Descending softly over Icicle Creek, snow lingers,
a descant, in the still of cold mountain air.
Outside the cabin window, pale limbs of yearling birch
recall the early poems of Robert Frost
when earth was a pear-green place,
choice, common as seed.
Perhaps it's that I'm alone, reading
in the New York Times
Pavarotti's remarried, has a new daughter,
a one-year old named Alice, left behind his first wife
and their three daughters in Padua.
Perhaps it's that my mother-in-law is slipping away,
a frail moon who won't eat,
while the shadow of my father lengthens
over California, touches the map where I was a child.
Or maybe it's the way the cabin's cedar siding is stained
by the charcoal rime of winter's jagged line,
deepening this song, B flat minor melody,
strummed long ago, on a wayfarer's guitar.
There, I, too, belong, with the tribe at the circle fire,
interludes of snow falling,
a descant in the still of cold mountain air.
* First published in The Wetlands, Cascadia Community College's Creative Arts Club Journal, 2004. It was later accepted for an anthology, Mute Note Earthward, published by the Washington Poetry Association in 2004.
