Lessons in Figuration

Awaken to shimmer
gift of distortion
floaters in both eyes.

Two children spend an hour or perhaps three hours
building houses out of leaves and nutshells
that they carefully install in the low branches of a tree.

When I asked the painter
why green shadows
he explained light and dark.

The children’s game goes on for weeks for months
They fashion a new language
speaking for half an hour at a time in invented words.

The painter, my grandfather
usually painted me
when I was ill, moving less.

Later, two guinea pigs are named in the language.
At camp, one child writes a sonnet for the other, whose father
recoils, signs his daughter up for soccer and robotics.

The immobility
left me restless
but for the attention.

Was there actually a red fairy who said:
Why do you think we want to live
in reach of your little dog?

Once, when I was sketching
with his pastels my grandfather said,
You Do Not See.

The blue fairy was more practical, telling the children,
Our favorite neighbors build us homes under the eaves.
Dry, defensible.

Warning

Crows on the wire call morning, one grooms the other,
slow move of beak through feathers then withdrawal.

They know windows—don’t fear
our young black cat who stands guard on the mantle.

Moss clings to north-facing branches
while buds thicken the twigs. The gift of southern light.

In my tree-hugging days I was afraid of falling but
kept climbing to a branch I called mine.  

Traffic pauses on the way to the station.
I would know rush hour if all the drapes were closed  

and the dryer was white-noising in the background.
It is about vibration, about a broken soundscape,  

unlike the steady freeway or the crash of waves
against the cliffs. I saw a high-water warning

for a winter plus tide. I crave the minus tides
edge of the shore receding to reveal barnacles and crabs.  

Once a girl, my mother, was sent to a home at the shore
to breathe fresh air and grow before being brought  

home to an apartment above the store. Afterwards
she attempted to clean her depression era plate and sit still.  

Every mother’s story breaks through into a present,
distracts from the sparrow nest constructed in a barren tree.  

Later that girl, my mother, fled from the party
with the wrong man, which is the start of another story, 

long before I climbed the crabapple tree looking for quiet,
while I spied on an empty house.

Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, as well as “Best of the Net” and “Best Microfiction” nominations.. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in journals that include Pleiades, About Place, Cutthroat, Five South, and Scientific American. Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math and writing in Berkeley USD, as well as at museums and conferences.

Published July 15 2025