Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives with her husband and two shelties in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where she is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. She has published three collections of poems, The Body's Horizon (Signal Books, 1996),
Beyond Reason
(Pecan Grove, 2004), and Out of the Garden (forthcoming from Mayapple Press, 2007). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Looking for Ceilidh
(Mill Springs Press, 2004) and The Master's Wife (March Street Press, 2004).
When she left
you went into the barn
to open windows,
release house wrens
trapped in the eaves,
and they rose to the top
branches of the buckeye
while you stood below,
rooted, facing what was left
of the day, until finally
they flew beyond memory
into dusk and you went in
to sleep so drenched by dreams
you did not want to wake.
