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2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Jeanne Lohmann

Jeanne Lohmann grew up in Ohio, graduated from Ohio State University (Social Sciences), earned her MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University after her four children were out of the nest, and now lives in Olympia, Washington. She enjoys teaching workshops with emphasis on new work. She says that ongoing commitment to a writing group provides discipline and encouragement for her writing.

Most recent of Jeanne’s six collections of poetry is The Light of Invisible Bodies (Fithian Press). Other books include Flying Horses and Granite under Water, companion to her prose journal, Gathering a Life. A new prose collection, Dancing in the Kitchen, is forthcoming.

 Her poetry appears in three Olympia chapbooks from New Market Press and in Greatest Hits, an invitational series from Pudding House Press. Her work has been published in anthologies from Atlanta Review, Beacon, Chicory Blue, Pudding House, and University of Georgia Press. A narrative sequence, “Singing Backward,” was published in a limited letterpress edition of work by San Francisco Bay Area poets (Protean Press). Her work has appeared in the publications Atlanta Review, The Bitter Oleander, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, Pontoon, Raven Chronicles, Runes, Santa Clara Review, Seattle Review, and Shenandoah.

Jeanne’s collection Thread that Sings in My Hands was the winner of the 2003 National Looking Glass Chapbook Award. Olympia Poetry Network has named an annual poetry competition in her honor.

4 poems

Sorrow Trees

If there are fever trees, and they tell me there are,

I know where I’ve been walking. No one’s named this

similar species, but sorrow trees exist. Look

how rain brings out the red, how wet

the blackness shines. Long patterns on these trunks,

irregular and gnarled. This bark never peels

as eucalyptus does. My fingers move around the knobs,

trace the grooves they’re caught in, as I am

caught: I heard of a man so lonely

all he had to hug was trees. Every day

I live like a botanist, examining these roots,

naming the dark veins of the leaves.

            from Between Silence and Answer;

            first published in Yankee  

Generations

Our stories lie down in the orchard,

their time is not now, but something is

coming, something is going away. They

rise to the stars, and wait to be told.

There are listeners who know how little

we know, how much we are feeling.

We had to go our own way, a little off course,

always, no matter how specific the directions

seemed at the time. In this universe if we’re lucky,

we will live in our children’s stories,

their tales that will turn us to legend,

some absurd truth that has nothing to do

with our plans, our meticulous records.

No matter what stories we discard or keep,

they will give us a life we cannot imagine.

Beside the Dosewallips

It was a morning of river music,

the same river that sang all night

in and under my dreams, moving

my hands toward your body, and I

forgot everything I ever learned except

our love-times. I forgot everything

I can never tell you. The river carried me

on its back, and now it seems I am towing it,

testing the ground along the bank with my stick,

through knee-high ferns and the downed trees.

An unknown bird is romping on the rocks,

and all the while the river is rushing and going,

music that can only be towed by the heart

into the morning of one particular day, this one

that is here and shining, and forever now.

Shaking the Tree

Vine and branch we’re connected in this world

of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves

contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple

belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air

that claims it, then ground. Connections

balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,

hanging together, we don’t know what our lives

support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.

Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends.

            originally appeared on the Panhala Web site

(www.panhala.net)