Poems by Katharine Coles

Sestina With Wand And Boy
 
Might be a sorceress.  Might be a boy.
Might grow into a tree nobody’s bothered
Naming, then break something
Into blossom – apple
Or cherry – then make a mess with seed,
Frisky as a cottonwood.  A small woman
 
Alone by the window, I watch a man
Walking his dog and a boy
In a cape, following what he sees.
His stick spells the air.  Unbothered
By time or destination, he names his apple
Pear and bites: I see one thing
 
Become another thing
As a man becomes a woman
By changing Barry to Cherry.
Am I a woman?  I see a boy
Who doesn’t bother
Spelling her own name: she sees
 
Farther than her father or me, can see
How to make a word a thing
From stick, tongue, and breath: hers
Or his while I stand here being a woman
Mostly.  The boy may be a girl
Though his father calls Barry
 
And hurries them up.  A fruit
Hides a stone or a thousand tiny seeds.
The world ensorcells a boy
And he names himself something
Nobody’s heard of – as if a man
Could be who he bothers
 
Naming.  Eve: I’ve been her
And not her. We eat pomegranate
Or apple. Launching history, women
Disturb the leaves.  Unseen,
Even man, I guess, is a thing
The world names a woman or a boy
 
Becomes.  Why bother saying
Which thing I call apple, which rose--
Boy, sorcerer, woman, man?
 

 
Imaginary Tattoos
 
The dream still in flight
Though all too real its burn
Where needle draws its thread
Through skin into the nerve--
 
Here a figure wings--
Bee, or lark, or child--
Too quick to catch the eye
And high to hear its song--
 
Rather ink a word
An unembroidered thing--
Letters bleed and outline
Muscle – vein – bone

Katharine Coles' tenth poetry collection, Time and Chance, was published in April 2025 by Turtle Point Press.  She has also published a collection of essays, The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing, and a memoir, Look Both Ways, along with two novels. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.
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