Maureen Tolman Flannery’s
latest books are Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher’s Daughter and A Fine Line. Although she grew up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan have raised their four children in Chicago.
Her work has appeared in forty anthologies and over a hundred literary reviews, recently including Birmingham Poetry Review, Xavier Review, Calyx, The Pedestal, Atlanta Review, Out of Line, and North American Review.
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Morning in Tepotzlán
Morning drops its cacophony over Tepotzlán.
Roosters crow the town to sluggish wakefulness
while all the dogs of the valley
bark at the gallos to quiet down.
Birds from the mountain woodlands
and birds in courtyard trees begin singing
each other corridos, breaking their all-night silence
as they dart through the pinkening sky
from mango and avocado trees
to the huge amate towering up
to silhouette against the mountain
with the gray stone steeples of the convent church.
Bells clang their ancient bronze testimonies
that reverberate through the valley
and settle beneath the weave of rebozos
on the heads of church-going women.
Moisture of the night storm drips dreamily
off red clay and palapa roofs,
off conduit leaves
into upturned vessels of copa de oro.
Grand white butterflies, clean as forgiveness,
sail silent and indecisive through purified air
until, at last, the awaited sun arrives in its glory,
round and cochineal red from behind the mountain.
The Hook
On which cast did it all become
a tangled mass of fishing line
a jumbled glob of useless leader
impossible now to unwind because
of the lure on one of the ends?
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