Location
how do you
wait for it?
how do you
open yourself to it?
where has it
been
or what?
The poem has been
out all night.
It sped off when it
became clear
I had no intention
of attention
sometime after
midnight and I, in bed
with an old lover,
was only within his arms distance
in no way
listening
for another whisper
another reaching
another dark
highway
and so the poem,
spurned,
spun out off the
soft shoulder of the slick levee road
and broke into all
its letters
and its sense to
itself was lost
and hurt
but there was the moon
and the moon binds
us
vowels to sounds
arrangement to
sense
difference to
satisfaction
and before dawn the
unloved poem returned.
It emptied itself
in through the window
slept in
jumbled phrases on the couch
covered in the mud
of the world, shivering,
home (I think)
belonging there
next to a splay of white
carnations
some brown or browning
some still full and
soaked with moonlight
Or,
the poem, another
perhaps,
was flour in a jar
then
nothing, not much,
held, contained
powder white
In the dream I call
out for her.
The location is a
giant warehouse and the color slips
from warm-bright to
grey. Cool greys.
No one is there.
Though she is, somewhere.
Pallets of shelving
and plumbing and parts stack up
high overhead,
leaning, and I call for her.
This could be
death.
This could be a
poem.
Or a message.
The world waits in
the dark for color,
for water,
attention, use and order, reorder.
A kiss. A saying of
words.
Placement.
Designation.
Context.
Care.
It waits
to be called into.
It yearns to call
back from.
His skeleton pulls
mine closer
as the earth turns
in such a way
that sunlight
enters the room and puts things where they go.
And from somewhere
comes a sound of gratitude.
And from somewhere
comes an image for a poem.
