Sutterwriters

A Collections of Poems by Jan Haag
. . . .  with accompanying audio CD
Foreword by Lawrence (Chip) Spann
Cover Photo, "Pegasus" by Dick Schmidt
Book design by Jaime Oliver
ISBN: 0975442139
Library of Congress Control Number : 2006932823
Contact Us to purchase this book
$15.00
Shipping via USP Priority Mail (up to three books) is $4

companion spirit  MP3 Audio

walking in the
front door i
have to catch myself
at the threshold-
the first breath inside,
i inhale you

another step, woozy
with the scent of dog
and wood shavings,
i breathe again

you
here

i call your name,
hoping,
but there is
no answer
no dog
no wood
except the oak
tables you
crafted by hand,
the shavings long
swept away

i pause in
our living room
barely breathing
heart thudding

though there is
no vision
no voice
you've made an
appearance

inhaling you
again, i use
your line when
you'd first hear my
voice on the phone:

"there you are"

pumpkins   MP3 Audio

(for Jeff Knorr)

i can't write a love letter—
i can't figure out the proper postage
to heaven, much less the zip code,
so he'd never get to read it anyway.

and if it did reach his hands—
would he have hands? or eyes?—
hell, the aneurism blew out
his brain, & what was left,

i had cremated & returned home
in hard brown plastic
like a fat VHS box, but weighed
more like a pumpkin, which

he loved to scoop out & carve into
scary faces with peaked eyebrows
and snaggly teeth to set on the porch
for trick or treaters.

come november, he'd plunk them
around the yard to rot like punctured
basketballs, splitting at their seams,
not fully decomposing till spring when

it was time to mulch again.
i put bits of him, nothing more
than ash & bone, out there with old
pumpkin pieces & long-dead cats

because he taught me about living things
going back into the earth, the cycle
of seasons, dead things making
the cosmos bloom pink & the lavender grow tall—

and though i don't carve pumpkins
anymore, i do penance as i mulch, wishing
i'd attacked the weeds more vigorously,
worked the soil better last year,

fed it just the right nutrients,
found a way to get word to him—
postage be damned-
that i haven't forgotten,

i'll never forget.

Gone  MP3 Audio

Two months after, she realized
she could not envision his eyes—
smoky brown, heavily lashed—
searching for her.

After the first year, she lost
his voice, no longer felt its timbre
resonating in her head,

and by the second, the texture of
that early gray hair she cut
in the backyard—gone.

Four years in, she forgot
how it felt to hold him exactly,
and worse, how he held her,

how she'd press her head
against his chest to hear
that clicking valve,
plastic encased in a heart.

She remembered the silence after
it stopped, and him
coldcoldcold in his chair,
one foot fallen off the ottoman.

She touched that porcelain foot,
wore it heavily in her lap as she sat
on the hard wood floor,
felt death thud inside her.

She should have recorded his voice,
memorized his hug, tucked
away snips of hair after cuts—
something, anything
to make him stay.

Now and again, in dreams, he
appears, calls her by name,
his deep voice resonating
though the pillow and
the thick of sleep.

She tries to drag it
with her into daylight,
but she wakes to only memory,
too distant to touch.