Eloise Klein Healy
    It is a pleasure to welcome Eloise Klein Healy to our reading today. She has been a huge force in Southern California poetry for decades and is the founder of the MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University.
    Tim Seibles, author of Body Moves, has written:  “Eloise Klein Healy writes poems that refuel my heart. When I read her words, I am pinned by all we are up against—from reactionary politics to the plight of aging parents but the poems also offer the necessary grit, that combination of compassion and tenacity, which makes it possible to be glad for the chance to walk on two legs. Reading this book, I am reminded why there must be poetry in the world, especially now.”


Not Disappearing

The poems I write
to you, Sappho,
seem bird-bone light
in comparison
to my poems about cars
and the freeway
and the heavy-metal centuries
in which I've lived.

Something disappears
when I talk to you,
and it also happens
that each word's history
leads to a question—
what nouns and verbs
could we share
straight up?

I think the most beautiful words
are drifting, smoky things
with such long histories
you would have known them
as I would know them:

dawn,
the moon,
waves and boats,
laurel trees.

I think we both know the meaning
of a line of women walking
back from the beach,
some singing, some
carrying baskets—
and one who runs ahead,
runs not in a direct line,
but dips like a swallow—

and a cloudless pale blue sky.




© 2011 Eloise Klein Healy
Eloisse Klein Healy was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the November 2011 Second Sunday Poetry Series