She rinses her face and smooths her hair. The street
comes to life, the smells of morning from the coffee bar.
Grab your ankles, press your forehead to your knees.
I used to be able to slide a raised leg along the barre.
Sometimes I’m seized with a longing for what I don’t know.
They indulge me when I sit in the dark at the local bar.
Just when she thought she’d cleared the tests, they called
her back. Don’t you know they’re always raising the bar?
His voice on the phone, now husky with age— how long
since he whispered in my ear in a college bar?
Thirteen cattail heads in the shallows, like swizzle sticks;
water clear as vodka— You’d think this was a poetry bar.
A couple wanders in; a blinged-out dude in cowboy boots. The street
philosopher, red-lipsticked waitress. All this in one night, in a bar.
The days are getting longer. Soon we can sit on the deck, drinks
in hand, watching the sun torch sheets of water beyond the sandbar.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Always a Story
- Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting
- Letter to Implacable Things
- Landscape, with Cave and Lovers
- Miniatures
- Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here
- Letter to Silence
- Landscape, with Returning Things
- Postcard to Grey
- Not Yet There
- Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)
- Between
- Parable of Sound
- Letter to Providence
- Glint
- The Beloved Asks
- Letter to Longing
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Twenty Questions
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Interlude
- Villanelle of the Red Maple
- Letter to Leaving or Staying
- Salutation
- Letter to Love
- Letter to Fortune
- Territories
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
- Dear season of hesitant but clearing light,
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Singing Bowl
- [temporarily removed by author]
- Risen
- Refrain
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Dear heart, I take up my tasks again:
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Ghazal with a Few Variations
- Risk
- Vocalise
- Tremolo
- Interior Landscape, with Roman Shades and Lovers
- Bird Looking One Way, Then Another
- Gypsy Heart
- Landscape with Carillon
- Letter to Ardor
- Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn
- Marks
- Landscape, with Sunlight and Bits of Clay
- Slaying the Beast
- Measures
- In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight
- Landscape with Shades of Red
- Between the Acts
- Letter to Duty
- Letter to Nostalgia
- You
- Song of Work
- Balm
- Landscape, with Wind and Tulip Tree
- From the Leaves of the Night Notebook
- Letter to What Must be Borne
- Redolence
- Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter
- Night-leaf Tarot
- Trauermantel
- Foretelling
- Aubade, with Sparrow
- Reverie
- Mineral Song
- Layers
- Prayer
- Proof
- Landscape as Elegy for the Unspent
- Vespertine