|
Back to Front
(after Louis MacNeice)
What she didn’t want
was want. Numbness.
Something less. Hidden
within were hard remnants.
And more—
Memories of reversal
all the more real:
Orange peels, dried
like chips forgotten
in a napkin
left in the bottom of her
summer purse.
Far worse—those things hard
that started soft:
Part of a laugh
after she fell, pretending.
Fall’s trembling at limb’s end. Dangling
angels stiff in a tree, balanced.
The glance she held
well beyond comfort
or want.
Watchers
(a folded sonnet)
After the long walk home,
after damp shoes are shed,
showered bodies flop still
glistening across new sheets.
After the rain comes down
in dusk as half-sleet reflected,
a scrim around the static
half-sleep of those collapsed
just now touching at the feet
in their sprawled solitudes,
creatures with closed eyes
larger than knowledge—comes
a creature with larger eyes still
through the blue distance, through
hard darkness then unnamed light,
to the path the couple walked, to
orbit a crater pocked in the dirt
made by a drop of sweat, its salt
now a ring of white around the edges,
a period, a reminder—as when we stop to
look to the moon, even in sleep,
or to where the moon once hung
with its own gray craters unseen,
stark in its one bounce of sunlight.
Despite the hours falling, the blind work
of the heart, how we are still, in the end,
just that: sparks thrown at the start, drawn
and circling—far more here than sensed.
To the wind the stem that once I thought would save now bends
[ a Fibonacci spiral reversing ]
To turn to
the wind—the
wind that unwinds
the dead vine from the
stem of rose, that tallest stem
that sways, the dried morning glory cord that
once strangled now unraveling at last, reluctantly (once
I had wound myself around something I
thought wanted me, so I thought)—
would not be wise, would
save not one. Save
now: what now
bends unbends.
|
