Midnight Housekeeping

Patricia Spears Bigelow

ISBN 0-9725562-2-2

80 pages, 2003

The life of gardens and wonders of backyard trees. A son’s transformation with the killing of his first deer. Dreams of grandmothers and daughters. Walks along the ranch road. Memories of Madrid. A kind of wondrous restlessness finds voice amongst these pages of poems.

Praise for Midnight Housekeeping:

“Aptly titled, Midnight Housekeeping explores the tensions between life’s tranquil surfaces and the mysteries at work underneath, gently sweeping from the familiar to the visionary and downright amazing. I deeply admire these poems.” – Carol Coffee Reposa

“Dreams, memory and landscape weave together in these luminous poems, creating an intricate fabric of image and metaphor—occasionally startling, marked by beauty, worked with care.” – Mary Earle

From Midnight Housekeeping

A Poetry of Clearing

You start with bare hands,
quickly learn from fire ants, poisonous plants,
the thorns on low-growing stems—
your need for leather gloves.

You learn the need for tools—
a trowel, a hoe, a weeding fork,
a pair of pruning shears.
Ground has hardened since the rains.

Sweat stings the eyes
under stage-light glare
till a tattered curtain of clouds
draws a black velvet threat.

You labor on. A day
will stretch to two, to three.
You neglect to wear a watch.
Appointments are forgotten.

The scent of earth, of green
enfolds you in a poetry of clearing,
beginning as a small space
widening over years

until there’s room for flowering
for fruits to feed a whole life
and later for the earth
to take you back again.