Prompt #9: Jezqi

Of Rivers & Respiration

It's April & you're going home.
I'm breathing you
out into the night
as I watch you from upstairs,
after I gave you back
everything
I still could. I once took
you into me. Now, as you pass
under my balcony I'm looking
out into a rainy darkness just
cool enough not to be summer
yet, as the Merrimack sighs
contented & wet,
fills the air with fog.

I wonder what you're feeling--
do you now understand why
I smoke?  How else could I
see, quantify, a sigh?
A poem?  No--though
it swallowed my heart
every time you'd sneak
your arms around my hips,
it is a trite image not
a Speaking Occasion. Muted,
I could only blow that hope
into the air
& watch it hover around us.

I'll miss walking
you to your car
in a light mist,
how the river thickened
the air
as if it could convey
that lovesickness
of the departing--helpless
surrender that felt deep
& broad inside me, epic
even in those old
overblown roles
(departing, forsaken)
& the clichéd setting:
the dark being so much more
beautiful than a clear night.
A sigh of the flowing away, more than
love, more than hope,

& what swirls around me
tonight is quietly shattered
fragments of everything I
ever felt in my life--
all at once & puissant--
still hoping,
still worrying, a cloud
in the night air.

oldy but goody

Stop the Car

I'm on route 20
and it's dark with a smattering of headlights,
dots shining on the radar screen.
The cold steering wheel hurts my hands,
And it's 28 degrees, the radio man says.

In Baghdad, it's 28 degrees--
Celsius not Fahrenheit.
A despot is condemned to death,
another raindrop in the monsoon.

My eyes wander off the road
and in the midnight sky a flash
and a trail of a falling star, but is it
Space trash or meteorite?
These things don't matter much,
I still make a wish.

28 degrees?
It's cold or it's beautiful--
Saddam is dead?
Sunnis break their curfew to vow revenge,
Shiah break their curfew to shoot their guns
in elated joy.  Both sides will explode themselves
the very next day.

I stop the car,
and call you, my love, just to listen
to something besides the radio voice drone,
because it's cold and I'm lonely
whether I saw space trash or a star.

#8- Arthur

Years, Buried

I was never that aware of root vegetables,
unexpected sweetness of a beet
melted into a dish of yams—
the only hint it was there
the red-purple tint of the dish,
the surprising fuchsia, sugary taste.
I was never aware things could
taste red or that buried things still
matter, but people are of the Earth.
Unburying stores in us is wholesome
& nourishing, too. Time uproots
what we shied from showing.

I am finally holding this up,
looking at what I carried
so long under my coat, considering it
never: years later, in Salem
as I’m walking the historical tour
painted a pasty red-purple
on a sidewalk. Some city worker
has lifted sections of the line up
with manhole covers, put it
back crooked & in pieces
with little crosses & tangents along

the way—it reminds me of a time
when I readjusted all my covers,
attempted to walk my line more
straightly—lost contact with tangents,
which were present only as stories
over wine at a soiree: travels.
Places seen or found or felt.
But what matters? A rose garden
in Utrecht? Or what was said there,
or a philosophy hand-written in a letter
& sent overseas to me explaining
what would make people like us perfect lovers ,
or the time I saw the shy girl
obscuring her face but laughing at a camera.

Being what I am, a digger,
I wonder over every askew
line I might’ve followed
into an alley just once—
with that one girl I thought was
opaque even as she let me see
her dreams

over hours of talking, then I changed
my diet
but I couldn’t change the pang
of some feeling I knew was
but didn’t know where
because that deep, red
place in my heart wasn’t marked
on the map or in the garden patch.

#7: Mareike

The Spleen of U-----

Mr. Utterson was a man of a rugged countenance
but so would any of us be, dear reader,
watching a friend disintegrate
like that biblical shadow,
Lilith in Dys, once willing to be equal
of men, then queen of the unholy
urges & oddly nourished by evil
appetites.  Were Jekyll but a fallen
woman U----- could ask, Wench:
have you been entered
by a demon?, but instead he must wear
a gentleman's aloof cheer
& a ragged beard the only shadow
darker than the night he walks with E-----.
What trifle could U----- be
about at this hour?
They say men aren't affected
by matters of spleen as women
are who swoon in the whalebone
scaffolding all the time
but then what is that dull ache
near U-----'s stomach about J-----?
This is sympathy among gentry,
allowing the accident one knows
will happen--arms crossed,
look wistful until Hyde bursts
into the room & shakes them awake.
It reminds me of something
Lilith's favorite nephew said,
arrogantly squinting into God's face:
Am I my brother's keeper?