Category: Poems & poem-like things

Is the moon spun of pearl, is it gathered
like honey and festooned with the smoke
from bitter herbs? Does milk foam better
with or without an egg in it? Is the bed
softer made or unmade, tousled by love
or not at all? Is a square of cotton or pressed
linen kinder for tears or for starch? And that
moment when the woman opens her eyes and looks
into the face of the one she walked away from
years ago— is that the depth or the height
of being, the tally of what has been lost
or found? I do not want to have to choose,
I do not wish to pare it down to just one
or the other— Everything is the ground
of our affections, everything is this moment—
the red dress you wear which is both brighter
and darker than flame, the surface of the table
which gleams like our skin, like our faces: rich
with the grains of the past and the not yet here—

In response to thus: close to the ground.

A lump lodged in the toe of a shoe. When I shook it out,
it was a spider large as a fourth of my hand, all brilliant
filaments. Dark body now gone: still I feel you twitching.

In response to Via Negativa: Default.

“In a painted sea, what to write?
A letter taking tomorrow back?” ~ D. Bonta

When the tide was low, I walked and loved the water and the sugary sand. When it was high, I stayed my careful distance and fingered threads, turned pages, steeped tea, listened to the murmur of voices in public rooms. They came and went, as if there were no tomorrow. I loved the varied colors of their customs, their buttonholes and hatbands, the air suffused with smells of tobacco leaf or oranges or lavender; I loved their dark heels of stacked wood, their calves wrapped in supple leather. Wind sped through the trees, which shed their leaves then budded as the season turned. Once, flying in as evening broke and the cities below filled out their grids with light, I watched as a couple kissed and kissed in their airplane seats. They sank into each other as if the air was tasteless, as if the sky was lackluster, as if their need for delirium was the color of the sun as it seized then disappeared at the rim of the sea. I wish you were foolish with me like that, I wish you’d come to me as if I were the last cool drink of water forever and forever in the world.

In response to Via Negativa: Out of Order.