Dusting the Glass

By Nancy Kaye Dobson

In Dusting the Glass, Nancy Kaye
Dobson trains a compassionate gaze
upon often unglamorous protagonists
or uncomfortable subjects. Precise
language and startling imagery evoke
the subtle significances of everyday
existenceof youth and aging,
regrets and revelations, dreams and
disillusionmentwhile the spaces
between images allow us to personalize
them with our own recall. Thus, we
are simultaneously drawn into both
the poems themselves and our own
memories, and we then must, as the
author has done, confront them and
wrest meaning from them. In any
case, to read these poems, we must
be undaunted by what we might find,
as Dobson must have been when she
stared these always human and often
haunting images directly in the face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456875831

Nancy Kaye Dobson

A native Californian, Nancy Kaye Dobson began writing at the age of fifteen and won her first writing award a year later. While an undergraduate at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, she accumulated several more awards for writing, including the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has previously been published in Byzantium, Cal Poly’s annual literary journal as well as The Sun Magazine. Ms. Dobson has also been invited to read at several poetry festivals at colleges and universities throughout California. Currently, she lives with her family in Northern California where she teaches high school English.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Nancy Kaye Dobson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2011903110

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-4568-7582-4

ISBN: Softcover      978-1-4568-7581-7

ISBN: Ebook            978-1-4568-7583-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Inheritance

Day at the Fair

Choking the Sky

Gravity

Just One

Avila Sunset

Counting Pennies

Last Note

Pumpkinhead

Rival

Sylvia

Kyushu, December 1971

Box of Winter

That first hour

Daughter

Get this down

Chroma

Latitudes

Those Girls

How a Leaf falls

from the Tree

Valley of Shadows

’45

Bonnie’s Last Breath

Cow’s Diamond

Letter to Francoise

Nora

Suicide in Life Magazine

War Bride

Fresh Rain

Transient

Michelangelo

Loose Ends

Restless Evolution

No Socks for a Martyr

Bring me a flood

Drinking Dust

Restless

Invited

Prey

Crawling In

Rachel

After Ruby

The truth about dying

Reunion Station

Face It

Cloudline

Borrowed Beauty

naked

Inheritance

I kneel down sometimes, distracted,

to look in the driftwood box of my life,

not sure what I will find—valued treasures,

old brassy jewelry and gunmetal coins,

plastic shards of buttons and toys,

ink-stained documents—bus tickets, birthday cards,

and children’s reports on armadillos and South Dakota,

pitiful remnants of helium hopes,

pictures of people I no longer know,

a dusty world of enormous gifts waiting

for a potential owner to come along.

That’s when the whisperings lift up

like half-inhaled smoke in a Midwestern bar,

a Greek chorus in an epic tragedy

full of undressed advice and silken musings.

I hesitate—things have always been best for me

when I’ve left that one word unspoken

like the moment right before Romeo’s glance

found a young, anonymous Juliet-

how different things could have been.

I could breathe in, let the voices envelop me,

or collapse like a fallen sparrow,

and shuddering into silence, turn away.

I am full of a thousand mistakes,

stapled together, adorned with dirty bandaids

that conceal half-healed knicks

left by a pen that scratches me open

like a rusty blade. It wants too much-

the hungry throat of a bird,

dazzling, plump arms of the sun

that reach for the fair-skinned.

No, it’s not satisfied until I put myself,

not some prettier pseudonym, on this page.

The unsaid words are familiar to me-

nourishing as a thick, yellow salve

or night cream on cracked heels.

Like secret lives that spin inside me,

I let them rule the asylum,

let rain make a salty memory

of each word’s pregnant moment,

let them seep untouched into the ground,

bury them in the mud without ceremony.

I know they long to dance wildly

on the agile tongue of a sorceress,

one who can tempt snowflakes down-

graceful and eloquent vowels of ice

falling into your open ears.

This is the moment, the chorus whispers

with a crash of cymbals,

not the familiar glow and hiss

of a reoccurring 4 a.m. dream,

the moment to take the orphaned words

into my rusty hands

like an overgrown plant I must tend to-

patiently clear away shriveled leaves,

pruning and clipping, as I examine tiny buds

beginning to emerge, beat by beat,

from the dark tunnel of the branch’s safety,

until the living embers have space to breathe,

open and unfurl themselves, writhe

and twist like fraying ribbons in the wind,

and all the world—every sharp corner

and rounded edge smooth off my tongue,

rises like a salvaged barge-coming back to life,

as it’s pulled, dripping and heaving

from a dark sea.