Today I’d like to report
a sudden absence
of starlings,
a hide-hole of rabbits,
an apparent hibernation
of bear.
Today I’d like to pin
the faces I’ve lost
to the names that won’t come.
How is it
I can so easily remember regrets.
Oh the things I did to you.
Oh the things you did for me.
Today I’d like to state for the record
that my mother once
gave me her pants
when mine were bloodied.
She buttoned and belted her trench coat,
pretended it was a dress.
The Dress
Pat Hale’s publications include “Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed,” and “Composition and Flight.” Her prize-winning poems appear widely in journals and have been anthologized in “Forgotten Women,” “Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis,” and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut in a little house surrounded by tall trees, and serves on the board of directors for the Riverwood Poetry Series.