Telling Time

Sandra Marshburn

Tree Trunks Have Thickened

When you drive past a house you
once owned you see the pyracantha
droop with berries. Tree trunks
have thickened. Tulip bulbs
feed under a bed of mums.

The rope swing is down,
the shutters now green.
Nowhere did the sales contract reveal
a perfect snakeskin in the crawl space.
You wonder what they have done with it.

Beyond the house the woods are dark
with vine and bramble. The things you threw
from the back porch: can opener,
nut pick, lock without key. Their secret
rusting lives belong to you.

ISBN 1-59661-126-x 44 pages/$9

Marshburn’s poems set the daily rituals of work and leisure against the vastness of time. These quiet, personal lyrics consider both successes and what would be failures—choices that end in regret, or boredom, dashed hopes, or loneliness—except that the choices are redeemed by the love that drove them. The ordinary endeavor, in all its brevity, shines here against the backdrop of infinity. Like the potter she tells about, a slave who secretly writes messages on his pots, Marshburn tells us about the ones she loves and what she saw in “the leppard & lion’s face.”
—Edwina Pendarvis,
author of Like the Mountains of China

Sandra Marshburn’s plain-spoken poems are rich in meaning and feeling. They have a fine visual dimension and insightfully register the beauties of place—day lilies, rosemary, or marsh herons—and what time tells us about how we should most value its passage. Awareness is all. In one arresting poem, she sits on a deck with her dog. Though the dog has cancer and only months to live, it listens intensely to geese overhead, watches squirrels in the sycamore and the grass under a bird feeder wavering with mice. Marshburn beautifully concludes: “I’ve learned / to sit here and wait, to take whatever / comes for what it is, haunches / positioned, ready to go.”
—Peter Makuck,
author of Off-Season in the Promised Land

The passage of the years can indeed be cruel and relentless in Sandra Marshburn’s fine new collection, Telling Time, but life must be lived, and her lines reveal that along the way there is beauty and wisdom to be discovered. These are honest, open and welcoming poems, rich with the language of life well-lived.
—Mark Defoe,
author of Ten Scenes with Mockingbird

Sandra Marshburn has also published chapbooks titled Controlled Flight, Undertow, and Winter Beach. For many years she taught writing and literature courses at West Virginia State University and edited the campus magazine, Kanawha Review. In 1994 she was awarded a fellowship for creative writing from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. She and her husband live in Edisto Beach, South Carolina.