Veronica Patterson

 

The Cumulative Heron

 

 

In the fog, she hears the heron�s croak,

the ship�s horn,

some third sound.

 

Her maiden name begins with an S

not unlike the heron�s neck, curves she hides

in her signature.

 

Through binoculars is not the same heron

from the fishing boat,

from beneath the surface.

 

When they married, neither had seen

a great blue heron or they didn�t know they had

among other things.

 

She studied eloquence.

Now she puts stones in her mouth

to make a shore.

 

The heron walking like bamboo

is the heron hunkered in rain

is the ancient arrow.

 

As she drives home from the house of a dying friend

a heron flies obliquely across the road,

its shoulders hunched.

 

Of the 10,000 winds,

none troubles a feather

of the heron�s ruff.

 

She reads many poems in which

there are herons. When she looks up, a silence

rests most of its weight on one dark leg.

 

 

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Veronica Patterson’s poetry collection, How to Make a Terrarium, was published by Cleveland State University (1987). Her poetry collection Swan, What Shores? (New York University Press, 2000) was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ 2000 James Laughlin Award and won annual poetry awards from both the Colorado Center for the Book and Women Writing the West. Her chapbook of prose poems This Is the Strange Part was published by Pudding House Publications in Spring 2002. She has also published one collection of poetry and photography, The Bones Remember: A Dialogue, with photographer Ronda Stone (Stone Graphics Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The Sun, The Malahat Review, The Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Mid-American Review, The Montserrat Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Willow Springs, The Colorado Review, Many Mountains Moving, Coal City Review, Dogwood, New Letters, Cimarron Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Runes, Pilgrimage, Prairie Schooner, and Lumina. She received Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1984 and 1997.