Lantern swinging down path —
I wonder if it is really there,
if that is you, or just some accident
of moonlight and wind.
How is it possible for the night
to be so black that no adjective
makes sense? Just black-black,
with shadows hovering and the wild phlox
lopped over reflecting greywhite back up.
No lantern, but there might as well be,
my heart lighting every moment,
bringing you back through memory
to stroll ahead telling me that story
I promised to never forget.
bruised inside
unable to feel
my edges
the weight dyed
into me now,
a flaw
a hollow bell
ringing itself,
silent
It is a mystery,
some prefer to say.
But this loss holds me
still, years of confusion,
hunching towards this, that —
perhaps spiritual decline,
perhaps a more ordinary plight.
Either way, the residue stains.
It is that purple stubbornness
I cannot separate from,
prevents perspective,
cannot see at all
if not through it.
It is as I come down this morning
and remember having tried to put away five
pounds of Idaho potatoes the other night
to find you had stashed twenty pounds
of sweet potatoes where I store potatoes
and onions even though we never eat them
and then having left my potatoes out because
there was no room for them and, besides,
I needed them for dinner the next night,
which was yesterday, after which I still
had a few onions and about three and a half
pounds of potatoes which I squished in
and around your sweet potatoes
and now see my empty Idaho potato bag
on the counter, all my potatoes gone,
you gone, no note (of course),
the sweet potatoes still in the pantry,
that it occurs to me when I said
you could stay, I might have lied.
This is the dance
we made together,
when justice broke
open on our laps.
How we spun that night —
me shifting, you spilling,
our learning together
that wild-beating fear —
boiled as one
into a speck, set
to carve our way
through years, to now, and on.
As the stars rise
through the night,
moon splits into beams
to warm this cold shiver —
it is all the prayer I can gather
for you, having let you tumble
into that endless thicket alone,
my fresh eyes forever tainted.
Poems from in between 