Penelope Scambly Schott

(Penelope Scambly Schott)

❉ I met Penelope Schott in the summer of 1977 at a writers' workshop in Critz, VA, where A.R. Ammons was the workshop leader. We have been friends ever since. Penelope then lived in New Jersey; she now lives in Portland, Oregon. She's an avid hiker, as the photo suggests. Penelope's earlier books include The Pest Maiden, A Is For Anne, and Baiting the Void. May the Generations Die in the Right Order may be ordered from Main Street Rag Books. (mainstreetrag.com)


❉ What’s Inside



When I opened the box
and took out the bag

when I unfolded the top of the bag
and reached in past my wrist

when I unfurled my fingers
and poked toward the bottom of the bag

when I stroked something
that almost felt like fur

it was my dead father’s springy white hair
it was my yellow dog’s silky coat

it was the channeled mink coat of the lady
who used to live downstairs

it was the silk-lined ermine muff
from when I was a princess

it was the damp taste of my yellow pigtail
wound around a puffy red thumb

it was one howl in a chorus
on this treeless hill

it was the tufted and variegated pelt
I am sprouting in my sleep



❉ What the Bed Knows



I am a bed in a busy house of loss,
frost in the yard and inside the house.

Today I am married to the lamp shade:
we cast our hot eye on the damp head

of a solitary woman dreaming of lions,
whiskers purring, fur on the quilt, not

this wide, cold sheet. No silence
ever wider than death, no absence

more complete. The languor of grief
astounds her. Her fingers are weak,

and she holds sadness like a handful
of loose gravel,

not knowing how to set it down.