"Now, by holding the stem and backing a long way off,
all the way out of your life to a ledge
above a dry pool, you could own the flower."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Autumn Cafe
Sometimes her old love
season of lessenings, season of dolor
would pass through town as the broomgrass was dying
fragrant seasoning, tinge of Other
and wait for her in the fragile dark
season of sickle, of brooding beet
inside the coffee shop whose light
season of keening, uncountable sleet
like a yellow tooth would shine out into the street
the burnished, the banished, here they meet
and she would have to walk through the light
reasons, reckonings, ruin, hard rain
that got on her coat and stayed there,
folded bird of the season of his name
the sheen of love’s penumbra
Season be nimble, be quiet, be quick
allowed in this public place,
Season don’t stumble, don’t be chased
and as she takes her place in the booth at the back
green, familiar wilderness
opposite him in whose presence
a vision, Season, in your best dress
her heart holds still as lemons
Season Season
in the grove where the god who made them
…sun…sun…sun…sun…
tasted them and said they were good
your new, your, ah, long hair
for bitterness is transmuted
spoons
when stirred by its first sweetness--
spoons
she finds that behind his glasses
two clear lemons lying on their sides
he has remained shy and lovely
precede him, whatever he decides
having spent the rest of his life writing books
the pages when she finds them in a store
in which someone’s dreams
blinding, more
of someone beget something,
like certainty,
a season.
_______________________________________________________________ The Yellow House for Sale
The stairway heard and has begun
Petunia, begonia, bee, gone.
Is it that the house is ready to be of?
Is it because the boy asked
The yellow house for sale.
that, in the yard, in swirling umber thought,
_______________________________________________________________ Hydrangea
Peel the petals back, the spillage back,
to the color of fire to the color of fire burnt to time.
all the way out of your life to a ledge
But the Other has set out a vase.
of how rain wishes, crookedly, to fall.
Stemming from a pool into which the skater vanishes.
As into the body with your voice inside it,
and into the body with O’s voice inside it,
finally goes the flower.
What seeing did.
Why in the world
_______________________________________________________________ Of the Two Muses
only one is dead.
what want is to what
erased. Here is my clock
and for the merely waking to kiss,
in its place, wider, wider,
what’s left of me is horses,
I never had a horse.
And got one.
latch the watch to my wrist.
_______________________________________________________________
the long walk down out of its heavens.
Four skates, two bicycles,
armchair with two shrugs.
No way to carry them.
Only the stake through the lawn’s heart
is real.
They were never here.
But the daffodil bulbs go with,
filthy pendants buried
where earth was made to swallow, healed.
Only, next life, green knives from some past war appear
to guard yellow mouths full of black arrows--surreal.
Of her? The child? The town?
Reluctance? Consequence?
Of sun? Of snow? Of gain?
Of that which falls to earth again?
The house only appears
to leer. From the ad. To be offered up as real.
Can we stay forever?
Something built of wishes got
transmuted into fishes, into sun,
yellow walls flashing yellow as sunfishes--
built only of language
yellow was, and was real.
All its angles proferred.
Its small state-liness. Li-
nesses. Lionesses. Its sweet
inward space about to be erased.
Tell only if they ask:
Naturally. It’s real. So real
something erupts:
winding, striding, wailing, curving
--ripe fish on a reel--and then
gone. Disappeared. Into the lot.
And there’s a lot of lot.
The cat, if you find him, is part of the deal.
the fists of paleness back from smouldering blue
Now, by holding the stem and backing a long way off,
above a dry pool, you could own the flower.
So now it is a charcoal sketch
Tenderness in the junctures.
As into the lion’s eye tameness.
water-in-a-vase,
water-in-a-vase,
The single blackened eyestalk.
What desire wants to be shriven to the shape of.
this flower.
But the equation balances:
one’s life is to the other’s death
we were that time and
that time, that time
with the hours washed off,
still pool for the woken dead
stone tongues upon a watery face
making one rippled wheel and then another
the wagon keeping pace until, in the end,
I hear the huge horses,
the big leather hearts iron
feet and smoothened straps--.
I may have been the one girl in the world
who never asked for one.
Twice.
Now two cracked straps
Slow and Slower, my loves
make rounds, exist.