Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Placerville on the banks of the San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate. She teaches poetry for twelve-step recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers and more. An avid trail runner and Nordic skier, she believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. She has eleven collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine and on A Prairie Home Companion. She graduated from Golden High in 1987. One-word mantra: Adjust.  www.wordwoman.com

Poems

Trusting Ludwig

It is slow and soft, the first movement—
the right hand sweeping in smooth triple meter,

the left hand singing against it.
Minor, the key, and mysterious

the melody, slow, it is slow and soft,
a walk through moonlight.

What is it that sometimes rises in us,
this urge toward crescendo, toward swell?

I feel it in my hands as they move
across the stoic keys, an urgency,

a reaching toward climax, a pressing
insistence, as if to sing louder is to sing

more true. But over and over again,
Beethoven reminds us, piano, piano,

his markings all through the music.
Oh beauty in restraint. It is soft,

the moonlight, a delicate fragrance,
it is heart opening, the tune,

it is growing in me, this lesson in just
how profoundly the quiet

can move us. And the hands,
as they learn to trust in softness,

how beautifully they bloom.  

First published in Naked for Tea (Able Muse Press, 2018)

Once Upon

There is a night you must travel,
alone, of course, though perhaps
there is someone asleep next to you.

The darkness knows exactly what
to say to snap every sapling of hope
that has dared to grow. It poisons

the gardens, even kills the prettier weeds.
For me, it hisses, though perhaps
you have heard a different voice.

The effect is always the same—
a self-doubt that grows up like thorns
around a fabled castle. What

you wouldn’t give for sleep.
But it is the awakeness that saves you—
the way that the doubt works

like an unforgiving mirror
and shows you all the places
that most need your attention.

It was never the fairies who bestowed the gifts,
it was doubt all along that entered
you and blessed you so that when

at last the morning came, you were
ready to rise and meet the world, ready
to be your own true love, flawed

though you are, ready to commit
more deeply to serving a story
greater than your own.

First published in Naked for Tea (Able Muse Press, 2018)

Latin 101

As a matter of course, we begin
with the impossible—conjugating love.
Amo, amas, amat.

My son and I sit on the couch and chant
the old syllables that have informed so many tongues.
Amamus, amatis, amant.

It’s almost always the first lesson
when learning this language
that few speak anymore.

Every other language I’ve studied begins
with to have, to go, to be, but here we begin
where humans prove our humanness.

I love. You love. He loves.
The news everyday is full of the ways
we fall short. Still, we devote our lives

to these six possibilities.
We love. You love. They love.
Everything depends on this.

Amo, amas, amat.
To my son, they are still only sounds.
He thrills that he can remember them.

But his mother, she wanders the conjugations
like paths, semitae, as if stepping through fields
of flowers or war with no idea where the feet

might land next, hoping that though the language
has died, there are still clues in it for the living.
Like where to begin.

Amamus, amatis, amant.
Some lessons are simple to memorize.
Some we practice for a lifetime.

First published in Naked for Tea (Able Muse Press, 2018)

After Many Attempts 

Just because it wasn’t here yesterday
doesn’t mean it won’t be here today.

Some things arrive only in their own time.
Just because I am talking about morels

doesn’t mean I’m not talking about love.
And here it is, golden and misshapen,

something I step over once before discovering.
I mean, isn’t it wonderful when sometimes

we choose to show up and then, well,
it’s not really an accident, is it,

that we find ourselves
with our hands, our hearts so full.
First published in Fungi Magazine

Picking Up a Hitchhiker in May

The burial of the dead is Humanity 101.
—Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet

It’s messy when they die
in winter, he says. The dirt
is too cold to work with then.
I tell him I will consider this
when I die. Just give me two-weeks’
notice, he says, quoting a joke,
and it occurs to me humor
must be an unwritten
prerequisite for a grave digger.
I ask him what he thinks
about the recent uproar in Boston,
no one wanting the bomber
buried in their own backyard.
Well, he says, I’ve always thought
we should have a special section
for the politicians. We could put
him here with them—in a place where
we let the dogs run.
In the space before I laugh,
I remember the story
the undertaker told about how
in the middle ages they considered
suicide the ultimate crime.
But since you can’t punish a dead man,
they took out their ire on his corpse
and buried it at a crossroads
to be trod on forever. He said,
“If we do not take care of dead humans,
we become less human ourselves.”
The man next to me says,
“You know, I give every person I bury
the gravedigger’s promise.”
We are almost to the cemetery gate.
“I say, I’m the last person who’s ever gonna
let you down, and the last one
who’ll ever throw dirt on you.”
He laughs a laugh so real
I can smell the earth thawing in it.

First published in New Verse News

Part of the Design

My son and I lean together over the thin resistor,
the nine volt battery, the LEDs in blue and red.

We fuss with the copper tape as it twists and sticks
where we don’t want it to stick. But eventually,

there is light, a small blue light. He can’t stop looking
at the glow on the table. I can’t stop looking

at the glow in him. I remember so little
about how electricity works. Something

about electrons being pushed through the circuit.
Ours is simple, a series circuit, with only one way

for the electrons to go. But I know that no matter
how complex a circuit, the same laws of physics apply.

It’s like love. No matter how intricate the scenario,
the laws themselves are always the same.

There are two laws of love, I tell myself.
One: you can’t predict anything. And two,

it will change you. For good. I swear
as I stare at him now, I can feel the electrons

moving in my own body. Or are those tears,
twin currents following familiar paths.

After Playing on the Parent Team in the Mathlete Olympiad

Odd joy in the pink eraser rubbings,
joy in the silence just after the timer says start,
joy in the turning of the inner cogs
and the way that the numbers
sprint across the page,
joy in the scratch of the pencil, the stumble
of confidence, in the scrapping of the route
so that a new route can emerge,
joy in arriving at an answer,
an answer so certain you can label it
with units and circle it and know
that tomorrow it would turn out
the same way again, not like any
other part of your life.

How It Might Happen

The baby black swift is born behind a waterfall.
It never leaves its nest until one autumn day
it leaves the damp familiar and starts to fly.

Though it has never flown before, it will not land
until it reaches Brazil, thousands of miles away.

There is, perhaps, a wing inside forgiveness.
Just because it has never flown before,
just because it’s never seen beyond the watery veil
does not mean that it won’t instantly learn
what it can do.

Like the baby black swift, it has no idea
what it’s flying toward. It only knows
that it must fly and not stop until it is time to stop.

It sounds so miraculous, so nearly impossible.

It is not a matter of courage. It is simply
what rises up to be done, the urge to follow
some inaudible call that says now, now.

Throwing Away the Canvas

A response of sorts to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Not that I wasn’t fond of it—the blues
and golds and thick brush strokes—perhaps it was
because I was so fond of it I threw
the art away, that life-size portrait of
eternal summer, mine, the painting in
which one hand reaches for the sun, the other
grows dark roots into the earth. Now all
that lives of those bright lines are these two hands
that painted them. With something less than care
I rolled the canvas tight and took it to
the trash, the company of grapefruit rinds
and last year’s mail. By tea, I’ve gotten used
to how the wall looks—empty, open, free—
already dreamed what else these hands might do.

Joyful, Joyful

From the back row, no one can see
that the flute player’s white oxford shirt
is misbuttoned. His dirty blonde hair
falls into his eyes.  He tosses it back
with a flick of his head, picks up his instrument
and focuses his attention on the conductor.

With a lurch, the sixth-grade band launches
into the last section of Beethoven’s 9^th,
and the familiar tune of Ode to Joy
brightens the dim auditorium.

The conductor keeps perfect time,
and the students, though stilted,
follow her rhythm. I think of Vienna,
1824, in the Theatre am Karntnertor,
when Beethoven himself stood on stage
at the end of his career to direct the premiere,
his first time on stage in twelve years.

Though he could not hear the symphony, he furiously
waved his arms in tempo, moving his body
as if to play all the instruments at once,
as if he could be every voice in the chorus. 

And when it was done, the great composer
went on, still conducting, not knowing
it was over until the contralto soloist moved to him
and turned him to face the ovation.

With the greatest respect, and knowing
that applause could not reach him,
the audience members raised their hands and hats
and threw white handkerchiefs into the air,
then rose five times to their feet.

When the sixth grade band director
lowers her arms, the young musicians stop with her.
They rise and bow, and the audience claps
and some of the parents whoop.
And the students bow again, and again,
though the clapping is done.
They do not yet know how to carry pride
in their awkward bodies, and they stumble
and list off the stage.

The flute player’s black pants are too short
for his long thin legs. He is growing in ways
neither he nor his mother can understand.
There she is, weeping in the back row,
in her ears, in her heart, a song
no one else can hear.

“Joyful, Joyful” first appeared in Naked for Tea (Able Muse Press, 2018)

All poems are Copyright 2018 by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer