Mary Aubrey is a friend I met while living in Door County, WI. We were fellow members of the local N.O.W. coven chapter, the radical women on the Thumb. Then she went off on adventures and landed in Massachusetts and I went off on adventures and landed in Seattle. On Monday, she and her wife, Nancy, arrived at my house for a week-long visit, and it is a joy surpassing most other joys to spend time with her and with Nancy, who is an absolutely amazing woman in her own right. My years in Door County were also my poetry writing years, and I wrote this one for Mary not long before we both left to pursue our lives.
Mary gentle hands to touch
Blackberry a wilding bramble
Butternut a sapling springing
Hundred feet a hundred years.Silent snow is soft and cold
And deep along the river shallows.
Down she follows, glistening rocks
An ice-glow road of full moon tears.There she bends in witchery
Winding, wending, smooth on hickory
Out beyond the time of flowers
There beyond the leaves.Melting rushing laughing valley
Springtime moss, a sunspring traveling
Ah, my Mary, bluets, eyelets,
Owlets feather victory.Laze in summer, lost in grasses
High and whispering
wisp-tops gathering
Daisies, hand-held buttercups warming
Full and whole and now come home.
Barbara Stoner
Sometime in the 70's