Kate Hutchinson recently retired from a 34-year career of teaching English to high school students and is now experiencing the next phase as family caregiver, library volunteer, and book editor. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals, and she's received two Pushcart nominations. Her latest book is “Map-Making: Poems of Land and Identity.”
The Twining Beneath Our Feet
Upon viewing Vincent VanGogh’s Tree Roots, 1890
What roots and rivulets, what channels churn, as we
walk through forests and fields? On his final day
upon the earth, VanGogh left an unfinished work
of knotted blues and greens – tree roots exposed
in a marl quarry, embedded in fleshy clay and lime.
Was he already imagining the entwining of bone
and sinew among those knotted, gnarling joints?
Perhaps he took comfort from soft mosses
wrapped around fingers of wood, furred cloaks
cushioning weary limbs like a king retiring in his
royal bed, protected from the castle’s winter cold.
How such a thought might bring us comfort, too –
that deep beneath the soil, our empty cages,
doors flung wide to free our winged souls,
may find rest in the ancient silt between
bedrock and air, among the cradling roots
of the very trees that shaded us in life.
Family Farm
Like her own face, she thinks, all
that barn needs is a good paint job.
Weather-worn. She knows how
that feels. We've both done our share
in ninety years, she tells it out loud.
How many winters did she trudge
out to milk those dumb beasts
to quiet their lowing, hear the hiss
of steam rising in ice-coated buckets,
see gratitude in their wet eyes?
The paint she called ocean blue –
now faded to weary sky – how proud
she'd been to tell her friends, Turn right
off of 34 where you see the barn roof
shimmering like a lake in the cornfield.
It's been twenty years since Elmer
drove his tractor back 'round the curve
toward the shed, forty since any horses
clopped there, near eighty since she
and her sisters rode the buggy to church
singing She's only a bird in a gilded cage.
She looks out one last time to the barn,
drinks it in deep before her daughter
wheels her away to suffocate in some
small room twenty-five miles away.