I Want to Be Part of Your Landscape

even if I lose myself.
I want to be part of that view
I've come to recognize
as you. I want to be
the soft shadow that clings
to the underside of trees. The dew
on the violets
thriving there. The secret
sent from leaf to leaf
to leaf on a summer morning.

I want to walk the distant
ridge, disappear (briefly) in the valley
on the other side. Mingle
with the mist that meanders
there. I want to wallow
on the flowered bed of tall grasses.
Rain on the fields, furrowed
and plowed. Drop down to that seed
you planted with your thumb. I need
to be that basic and unobserved.

Author Biography

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Deborah H. Doolittle, the oldest of seven children, has since lived in so many different places that she claims a number of them as "home," including Arizona, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, for a while, Okinawa, Japan, as well as North Carolina. She attended the University of Colorado, taking her junior year abroad at Lancaster University in northwestern England. After receiving a B.A. in history, she earned a master's degree in Special Studies with a concentration in Women's Studies from the George Washington University. At the same time, she completed a Congressional Fellowship with the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues and entered GWU's Ph.D. program in American Civilization, first becoming a research associate at the Library of Congress for the African-American Communities Project and then a research associate for the Alexandria City Archaeology Project. After teaching English at Arizona Western College, she obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University.

Some of her poems have appeared in Anthology, Blue Violin, Borderlands, Ginger Hill, Higginsville Reader, International Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Mudfish, Whetstone, Pembroke Magazine, and Yemassee. In 1991, one of her poems won an Associated Writing Program INTRO Award. A chapbook, No Crazy Notions, won the 2001 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Central Carolina Community College. Married to a retired U. S. Marine Corps officer, she lives in Angier, N.C., with two teenagers (one a flutist and the other a gymnast), four housecats, and a backyard full of birds.