Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her poems have appeared widely in journals in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is included in eight anthologies. The author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, Reed, now retired, lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest.

The Disposition of Things

In dreams, we learn the disposition of things,
How they evade annexation.

House. Horse. Dress. Rain.
Color of the lover’s eye.

By the porch, fuchsias that grew
Like bright porcelain bells.

At three, the yellow coat of the Palomino pony
That trotted you around the ring.

Violets on the fine, white cloth
Like bruises on snow.

Rain in Provence, and the roof tops shine
With the scales of red fish.

Rain. Horse. House. Dress.
The lapis of the lover’s eye.

There in the geologic city of Aix
Where the narrow gap of today called Now

Was already changing its name, you were foreseen
Striated with gray by that accurate eye.

Dream

No form we make can we live in long.
And art, a facula that can’t be inhabited.

We fall through our dream of an object-world
And reach for the curve of cradle and canoe.

The wave that breaks like the angled glass
Of a lantern.

The spider: bright coin, motionless
And centermost.

But the world eludes our fingers,
Oneiric as music.

Late afternoon, and a single pearl stain
In the blue air.

Dusk, when things are seen as through
A wall of pollen.

Sunlight that moves over the grass
Like antelope.

The cyclone of the rose.

My Father Returns to Stand at a Window

And it hurts to see the sunlight
cutting through the pane.
The sunlight that shines the floor
is stopped by no shape.
And on the oak boards where a dark, flat form
should be moving as he places his weight
first on one foot, then the other
I see only a brightness that doesn’t change.