With Yeats

         Drumcliff, Ireland

No refuse from pilgrims here,
no pens or wilted flowers,
notes stashed under rocks or
guitar pics like I’d found
on the graves of other giants.
Perhaps there are rules:
keep the grounds tidy,
leave nothing behind.

Blackbirds scream from the enormous trees,
cool Irish gusts whip up my hair.
I won’t stay long, he
did not believe in lingering after all,
death was not much,
horsemen would pass by–
only the mountain would abide.

I Am An Older Poet Now

More and more with my open notebook
and my coffee in one hand,
I pause, gaze at the air,
growing toward laziness or serenity,
thoughts unrolling
always returning
to my mother, gone to the invisible
these two years now.  At 85, she told me
with lit eyes, the most precious moment
of her day was when she sat on her blue couch
each morning, by her oval coffee table,
holding the silver-rimmed cup I gave her, black
Folgers warming the tissue-soft skin of her hands.
She would sit, breathing in the contentment of
the hour, happy for her solitude, to do nothing,
interval of coffee and stillness. How honored
I would be to become her.

© Andrea Potos

Andrea Potos is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry),  Arrows of Light (Iris Press), An Ink Like Early Twilight (Salmon Poetry), We Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon Poetry) and Yaya’s Cloth (Iris Press).  The latter three books received Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association.   Her poems can be found widely in print and online. She received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry from Rosebud Magazine, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review.

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