ICE BALLOONS
PoemsbyThereseL.Broderick
Answers Blowin’ in the Windstorms "Bandaids Have Memory Weave" Catalog of Invasive Winds Clover Pond Winery Dancing in the Grocery Aisles
Forty Degrees in February Glove the Giving Cat Greece As Seen in Suzanne’s Photo Gvbrdyvnis Ice Balloons
Note to the GenZennials Poem to Thank James and Brad Shepherd’s Climbing Sticks Small Ecstasies
The Favorite Jam of Queen Elizabeth I The Hunting Instinct The Whale-Horse Wind
Transparency * July 2025 Albany, New York (USA)
DEDICATION
To my husband Frank, without whose love and support my life in poetry would not be possible.
The Favorite Jam of Queen Elizabeth I ~ to my daughter Elizabeth in Ealing, London
The ribboned sachet on my dresser at home, purpled by lavender, reminds me tonight like a soft tap to the breastbone—
dawn is already tiptoeing over your window ledge, sunlight plumping leaves on the Lavandula you’ve been nursing
in a small pot. Have you stroked yet the plant’s fine hairs? or smelled the oils perfuming its indumentum? Text me
recipes you find for adding ground buds to pasta sauce or to yeast dough baked in your kitchenette oven, bread lavished
with homemade lavender jam. Share with me a photo of the English tea you brew by seeping crushed herbs, milk (no sugar).
After you’re all settled in, let’s stream that Ealing film Lavender Hill Mob, laughing together on sofas separated by sunsets and oceans.
Answers Blowin’ in the Windstorms
Why would I not drink the hot chocolate I could make from this packet of instant cocoa jettisoned by looting winds into my shrubs? Only a forensic team dusting for fingerprints could track down its thirsty owner. I’d love to FedEx it to a shivering child who lived through the earthquake in Tibet, but trucks don’t convoy over the Himalayas. I’d love to ship it to a family in California made homeless by wind-fanned forest fires, but their stoves, kettles, and spoons have melted. I doubt that Space X will offer to fly this Swiss Miss delight to astronauts whose dehydrated dinners come sealed in plastic.
Yesterday a half-ton metal ring of space junk collided like a meteorite with Kenya. So why would I not take a moment to relish sweet steaming milk, this happy accident?
Gvbrdyvnis
Hailstones clad-batter our ramp with Kartvelian consonants.
My wind chime hymns.
The Whale-Horse Wind
The wind in Albany rages, a livid walrus roughly tusking the porch chime’s four silver fibula, flinging a decapitated trash bin over our shed, slamming its massive boss-lumped shoulders against the house’s eastern flank, smacking and spanking our roof with oar-heavy flippers. The air convulses with guttural howls, rapier whistles, grunts, clicks. The cats have fled to the cellar pit and Frank’s out of town. I don’t flinch a muscle in bed for fear this whale-horse behemoth will roil its mucous eyeball, target my jugular. Oh where is my Anglo-Saxon syllable-fortressed armor? My Old Norse sea shanty hero?
"Bandaids Have Memory Weave." "Flowers Have Feelings."
If labels can be trusted, my bandaid remembers the thorn that cut my finger this morning.
If my florist tells the truth, that crimson rose felt strongly about spilling a poet’s blood—
delight, regret, or lust for scarlet. As for my writing hand, it's glad as daffodils to be
poeming again. See how it hasn't forgotten red drops blooming on a gauze of cotton.
Catalog of Invasive Winds ~ upstate New York, January 2025
Doppelgänger of Jack the Ripper.
Butcher who disembowels cloud banks pregnant with hailstones.
Thug who pummels the breasts of crows and minces all migrating Monarchs.
Banshee shrieking at Amtrak, ambulances, Mr. Ding-a-Ling.
Snuffer of rainbows, sunlight and moonbeams.
Apex predator of balmy breezes, drafts, jet contrails, hand-held fans.
Scoundrel who gargles greenhouse gases, then spits on pedestrians.
Ramrod. One who fistfights motorcycles, 18 wheelers, MedEvac helicopters.
Guillotine slicing off the plastic wings of yard flamingos.
Hooligan defacing trees with the graffiti of plastic bags.
Brawling hockey players.
Contortionist who ties up every tangle-proof flag on State Street.
Culprit flinging tons of trash over acres of solar panels.
Mercenary paid by The Army of Arson.
Traitor who overturned the Fenner Town turbine.
Ice Balloons
Christmas Eve, Ria and Corinna walk me outside to see their balls of ice, opaque and creamy as mother-of-pearl, adorning a path of patio stones. Three nights ago they plumped a dozen balloons at the kitchen faucet, knotted each neck, froze them on the porch. Stripped bare, their globes now glow
like a milky trail of magi proceeding caravan by caravan. I remember the prayer my sisters and I would murmur into the immaculate ceramic faces of Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child, halos lit by a small bulb dangling above our manger fifty years ago. Nowadays none of us prays although
we still enchant, igniting delight in one another’s souls as we wrap and unwrap keepsakes, treasures, jewels.
The Hunting Instinct
I’m sweeping the tiles beneath my fridge with an extra-long skewer, mucking about for the extra-expensive tube of Advantage the cat swiped off the table sometime last night. Now he studies me scraping slimy linoleum, snagging cobwebs, rattling the GE's sagging kickplate and by chance flushing out a barely visible spider who goes stippling across the floor to hide beneath the oven.
I have no human means to squash it.
See how I’ve become the dumbest hunter in my house. Probing crevices with a stick for a beetle-sized reward (never found) when all along, witless, I’ve been the prey. Plaything of a cat bored by his other toys.
Small Ecstasies
Stickers! she squealed, plunking down beside my knees squatting in the Poetry aisle— girl in tasseled pigtails, quivering, smiling as widely as a run-on line from a Jorie Graham collection. Stickers! she exulted a second time, holding out her Uber pack of 60 sheets with “tons of activities.” We’d never met, but then & there we rhymed with delight, gushing and yelping back and forth over this cornucopia of tiny stickers shiny as mica—a neon-yellow banana, umbrella, pair of sandals, Dalmatian puppy, orange kitten, candled cake, diamond necklace, school bus, train, jet airplane, roller skates, guitar and drum set, one pony saddled up, four kinds of balls, eight kinds of birds: robin, dove, flamingo, pigeon, eagle, hummingbird, sparrow, turkey. And when we reached the page replete with dandelions, roses, daisies, pansies and tulips, I could have leapt with glee into her mother’s arms, remembering that “anthology” means “bouquet,” and how in middle school I’d glue mini glittering blossoms all over the brown bag wrapping my book filled with wild things.
Dancing in the Aisles
Out of nowhere she runs to me, little girl wearing a tutu covered with yellow sequins and a matching tiara, darling girl who sees a large box of Snap Crackle Pop in my basket so guesses that I, too, love to go twirling around and skipping and posing on tiptoe. Before her grinning dad can hurry over she bows to me and I to her, we flex one foot then the other, spin twice, giggle, curtsy in sync. I forget about essentials on my list and the AC breaking down and fires, droughts, floods. Out of nowhere a sugarplum is sweeping me off my feet.
The trunk of the last standing olive tree thick, gnarled, pocked twists upward from the rubble of a low stone wall, partial gap in earthwork cobbled ages ago to guard a labyrinthian orchard. Mangled branches erupt from the photo's foreground impaling distant clouds. Does it obstruct my entrance into Elysium or mark the place of no return to pulsing flesh? question that riles to life my seven-year-old self who knew not how to invade, freeze-frame or hunt for exit, only to yearn climb higher! parting leaves to claim a view of The Cyclades circling Delos.
Poem to Thank James and Brad For the Peaches They Shared
Friends, remember that plum pilfered by the infamous Paterson poet?
This couple’s generosity is far more honest, their local orchard ripening in open air. The fresh peach they’ve passed to me comes so plump with their slow manual labor I need both hands to lift it to my lips. It is a singing bowl molded from pliable earth, polished by rain, refined in the kiln of summer heat; its skin a globe glowing with amber hues & sunset-orange. And fragrant fuzz—cashmere perfume rousing my feral sense of smell long dulled by fast-food bagels. How could my buds of taste not rejoice at flavors fanfaring from moist flesh, flaring like peacock feathers across the palate; or my tongue not relish these camel-soft chews, dribbling juices? Each ambrosial morsel in my mouth merits a day’s worth of adoration. And when the fruit's corduroy pit is all that remains balanced like a stone in my palm, I bow to the not improbable peril of a barren harvest next year. But for now, we bask together in this lavish harmless debauchery of poets' peaches.
Clover Pond Winery
He nods out the window at tall trees he’ll clear next season and earth he’ll bulldoze to form a hollow filled with local water— pond named before it’s dug. Name already printed on hundreds of bottle labels.
He dreams of a long row of trefoil hops crushed by bare-footed children and tiny flowers juiced in fall by his wife, son, granddaughter, in-laws, his painstaking father and mother and don’t we do that, too?—you and I drinking deep into evening, pouring white Louise while speaking of our bond perennial, firmly-rooted daughter, weddings and burials, banquet room toasts and parting glasses; then later, gazing out at stars
don’t we picture our own far-away, destined oasis? and map its charmed perimeter and count the paces from our porch to its sparkling wellspring where we hope to replenish, rest, rejoice in the promised land called Grandparents.
Forty Degrees in February
Raindrops plop off the roof, flute down my window screen’s cat-claw cuneiforms
then splatter on the deck chair’s beige canvas tent.
A few backyard birds— each the sentry for its flock— are cheeping, chittering, and dubbering at the damp trunks of hickories, signaling that soon enough rain showers will cease, decibels dwindle to zero.
But the crows—the crows contest with caws raw and arthritic: forty degrees and climbing, eight more months of flooding, sixteen trillion drops ordained.
Shepherd’s Climbing Sticks
~ Opilio Parietinus
That first volley of cold water streaking from the rusty shower head missed striking the daddy longlegs whom I caught sight of, just in time, splayed on the dripping ceramic wall.
It was motionless but not yet cramping. No joints collapsed, no legs retracted, body not yet morphed into one of those shrunken heads spiders become at the moment of their death.
At home in my kitchen I’d smothered countless insects with an avalanche of Comet; but that evening, through some intercession of grace showered down upon my chilly cabin by the mountain's guardian angel, my old terror of being hunted drained away.
So with a spade of folded toilet paper I carried the creature to a baseboard in the other room.
Two times that night I rose from dreams to blow feather-soft breaths on the shock-still body, drying its mouth and warming its heart. Sometime during my deepest slumber, it revived.
Next morning I searched by inches the pine wood floor, throw rugs, my unzipped backpack and the walls for which that climbing species had been christened. I found it, noiseless, skittering across the planks beneath my bed. Not some sign of divine absolution.
Not a counterweight to murders committed by red foxes invading the lairs of rabbits.
But at the least, a merciful rehearsal of that oath I'd been striving for ages to bring back to life: If nothing else, do no harm.
~ Old Amsterdam houses
Those first owners had nothing to hide from God or other burghers, opening wide their narrow front doors facing the canal, clearing a view of long straight hallways leading to rear windows revealing tidy providential gardens. Indoors they displayed only plain flat crosses. Their faithful wives copied verses from Statenvertaling Bibles, baked bread that abstained from sugar's temptations. Their sons spoke truly and modestly to congregation elders. No surplus words. Their daughters tended the sick and dying, lived blamelessly to earn a marriage. If you doubt their good names come stand on this humble threshold to witness swept stairs and scrubbed floor tiles. The Lord has saved them all a place in this year's catalog of guided tours.
Glove the Giving Cat
After lunch, soon as my rump gets comfy on the bedspread, the old girl shows up to knead my belly.
Her gold-apple eyes come to rest on my December-chapped lips.
Today is Giving Tuesday and Glove is giving giving giving over to kitten instinct, rousing the flow of mother’s milk.
And I am letting letting letting fourteen toe & foot pads pedal from one ovary to the other and back again
—because one snowy Sunday long ago I was a newborn mom, breasts compelled by the let-down reflex to offer my all.
Take more, more, more Glove purrs. Sweet pea, let’s spend this winter drinking deep from warm pools beneath the permafrost.
Note to the GenZennials from a Baby Boomer
Don’t be so quick to disbelieve the delights of aging from 60 to 69.
Try not to shame the treaty I’ve finagled between the shipwreck of my forties and the bolted hope chest (waterproof, I’ll admit) of childhood.
This morning I smiled and bowed to mugs upended in my sink, to the fresh stink of litter boxes, a pile of soaked towels and another deceased button battery.
I washed all dishes by hand, shoveled clumps of pee from sawdust, chaperoned each towel to the dryer, gently laid to rest the button in accordance with city ordinances.
All the while I was humming. Later I took a nap.
Simple deeds simply done, quietly, bestow contentment—
the macro delight of existence begetting the micro delight of wisdom begetting the nano delight, at 70, of zen.
COLOPHON for hand-made paper version of this chapbook (available free upon request)
*revised July 2025
*home printer is HP DeskJet 4155e
*paper is Staples, Premium Ivory, 32 lb.
*font is Garamond 11 point
*handsewn double-needle stitch is Japanese retchoso
NOTES
1) One possible language predecessor of the word “walrus” is “whale horse.”
2) Greece photo was taken by Suzanne Rancourt.
AUTHOR
Therese L. Broderick
brdrck@gmail.com / (518) 903-4432 text & mobile 391 West Lawrence St. Albany, New York (USA) 12208
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