Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

The Visitor

  In the dark, a baby fox hoists her short legs one by trembling one up the steep stairs, tripping the sensor light as she reaches the back deck in a sharp-eyed heap of gray brown fur. She toddles, adorably unsteady, across the width of composite boards, circles metal table and chairs, small nose searching […]

Sixty Unplugged Minutes with my Love

I used a text to carve an island from a Thursday in two overloaded lives. I typed 10 to 11 Walk with me. Moose Hill. I meant Come. To the refuge down the road, the one where boardwalks hover over murky waters in which juicy clusters of grape-like frog eggs expand in the quiescent womb […]

Everything is a Sign

Of all the offerings, a thousand possible signs, the Spirit Messengers chose poop. A pile of it, excrement of vague animal origins, arranged in a circle too perfect for random, dead center on my front step. And I, lover of beauty, faithful to poetry and all that sings cannot make sense of the leavings; what […]

FISHING

Perched on the frost hardened bank of the wide, cold river, eyes intent on the rushing water, dark and high, I notice the greenish brown river grasses, rooted hopefully in their muddy beds, in a permanent lean as the current pulls them forward, and my eyes train between the reeds, strain towards that bottom where […]

Hmmm. I thought I put me down right there

Here is Where All day the wind blew the trees against the house, and my old ears heard the hearty breeze as a roaring river, the kind that swells in spring, the kind that swallows half made nests the wind shakes from the breast of tight bushes and tosses carelessly towards the sky. Inside I […]

Love is a Rendering

Love is a Rendering   Telling you how I love you is like trying to find things that haven’t been said about the ocean. My hands prefer to paint it— affection, water— sweeping, striped backgrounds, turquoise and deep salient greens, silvery whites frosting every liquid peak, and there’s the sky hovering above the seas like […]

SHE and DOE

              It was a few years ago that I found myself meandering in a quaint little town in western Massachusetts, about two hours east of home. I saw the sign, which read, simply, THRIFT. As a a fervent fan of space and simplicity, I practice de-cluttering my home and […]

Autographing Autumn

I was walking, first field– verdant, moist , glorious carpet of greens, and the woods edged closer, with a beckoning trail, and then the floor was pine needles, punctuated with wily old roots in no pattern whatsoever. Sky was rarified blue, bluer, an artist’s glad canvas, background perfection to the leaves! Yellow and orange, rusty […]

CAThartic

  “Comes a time, “ said the first cat, when you can decide to be different than you were. You can stop scratching at the window, scheming to find a way to get back OUT THERE. You can stop re-living , over and over in your head, the pleasures and perils of running free, looking […]