Notification
By Linda A. Vandlac Smith
—for Ernest
Words have become unbalanced,
like river rock I move from one end
of my backyard to another to create
a new landscape to divert rain
that cascades through the downspouts
that floods over the gutter’s edge
like lemmings, too fast to comprehend.
Did you ever have trouble breathing
the rain’s displaced air? I know—
wet—the plainest grief will vibrate color
become rounded, symmetrical in eroding.
A single drop can rim the razor’s edge
of a rhododendron leaf without dropping
but will slap against my cheek as I hack
at the shrubbery to reshape this garden
trying to prune back your natural death.
Linda A. Vandlac Smith lives/writes in Washington state, north of Seattle, near where she grew up. She recently retired after nearly 42 years of teaching. More than three dozen of her poems have appeared in small press publications such as Permafrost, Mediphors, Pontoon, and Bellingham Review and in print anthologies including Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word (San Diego City Works Press, 2009) and Least Loved Beasts of the Really Wild West: A Tribute (Native West Press, 1997), among others. She has two adult sons. The poem “Notification” recounts coping with her grief after losing a close friend to colon cancer in 2018.