Five Spice Poetry Archive
September
You might see me paying my fare
going through the bus terminal every day,
marking lines in the same spots,
like basting stitches to hold the days together.
The world is finer than a thread and we walk on it thoughtlessly,
not feeling it sway in the high wind.
But we have to set out on journeys, and I like the way
both of my sons turned at the foot of the stairs
and waved good-bye with their faces carelessly turned away.
Now their radius is an infinite line--
their sets of house keys lie with legs splayed out
on the stands next to the empty beds.
This is the month when winds blow plants over,
when the park at dusk is suddenly a forest at night,
with whooshed unseen wingbeats just over my head.
Young shad are leaving the sheltered inlets in the Hudson River,
swimming into the deep water,
riding currents past the Palisades
under the bridges past the ferry docks
past the shadow of skyscrapers swimming fast
past the Chelsea piers and the long open stretch of space
where buildings used to be, following the salt
the tincture of salt as the water gets heavier and colder
out to the shoreless open ocean, but
bringing with them deep in their brains
a taste of home.
Posted September 22, 2008 by Lois Adams
I Used to Think
I used to think when people died their images would fade,
their color pictures change to black and white then grey,
their spirits hover like the light at nightfall.
After his fatal heart attack, I felt Walter tethered
to the earth, revolving like a moon in orbit
or were we revolving around him
who felt alone out there?
But when you died I saw nothing.
The sun eclipsed, the moon
went dark, and an absence grew
so vast a continent appeared where I now live.
Posted August 29, 2008 by Patricia Markert
SLEEP
Each of us is safe now --
one from the other from the other:
child with dried tears on her cheeks
and flung-out arms,
sleeper who did wrong
and the arrow turned back to him
and he felt it sharply. He sleeps now.
Even the soldiers sleep - their guns lying at all angles
and the prisoner whose body has only this
and too briefly.
We all sleep.
We are all taken by it, made calm for a time
or inert, like ruins
and if you hover, like angels do --
if you have wings,
you can hear our exhales, inhales.
Posted August 29, 2008 by Constance Norgren