Tart Honey
Deborah Burnham
Tart Honey
Copyright © 2018 Deborah Burnham. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3861-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3862-6
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3863-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Some of these poems were included, many in different versions, in the chapbook Still, published by Seven Kitchens Press, winner of the Keystone Chapbook prize in 2008.
Unending thanks to David Staebler and Jeanne Walker.
I
M–Th
Because at Monday’s dawn I kiss you hard
and won’t touch your sweet mouth or hair again
until Friday’s worked itself to shadow;
Because the years we’ve kissed add up to more
than those remaining to us, because
I want to squeeze time like an orange—
drinking the sweet juice, sweet flesh, eating
even the pith, the rind, wishing to find
another orange growing in the bitter seeds—
I’ve sent my dreams an order: no more
meandering through shadowed forests, no
casual lust for plums or single malt.
The new dream stays at home, to seize the time,
improve each shining dawn or midnight hour.
In Monday’s dream, your hand sits on my thigh;
On Tuesdays, your cheek rests in my palm
like a willing apple; by Wednesday, our
feet are tangled, eager, and determined
to stay ensnared in one another. By
Friday, I’ll have dreamed each limb and part
together, recalled the temperature and shape
of your absent body, making present what is far,
holding all that threatens to dissolve, disperse,
solid as the orange, distance’s tart honey.
Modern Love
It’s marriage a la mode, commuter
love; you leave with Monday’s dawn and stay
away while four more dawns unfold across
my single sheets. You left your worn gray
shirt. I’ll fold it in my pillow and write
a letter with my breath, one word over
and again: your name, mouthed into the shirt’s
soft threads where the rich salt of your skin still clings.
Eking Out
I watched Apollo 13 with you, marveling
at the ground crew’s loving calculations:
how much air and power they had per day,
per hour, after the broken ship exhaled
a shimmering cloud of oxygen into space,
which does not need to breathe.
Such useful lessons. How to use them now?
On Friday nights, you’re home, I have you
for two days, three nights, just sixty hours
to divide among my hands, my lips, back, belly,
trembling arms, each part ravenous, snatching
its full share.
One More
Catullus, wondering how to count the kisses
that would satisfy his lust for Lesbia,
suggests a number: the grains of sand between
Jove’s oracle in Egypt and some tomb
in Libya, or—less original—the numbered fields
of stars that try to light their furtive love.
We’ve loved so long, I forget what “furtive”
feels like, though years ago, we could kiss only
in dark rooms, dark fields, hiding the thin fire that leapt
through our legs and fingers.
Now, it’s one brisk, public kiss that makes me think
of those I won’t be tasting for a week or three,
that short kiss in airport traffic, stolen
while the cop stares, one brush against
your earlobe, then one more, quicker, drier
than our first, perhaps our last, this last thought
unthinkable, the necessary single
star that glitters, once so far away, now
right above us, behind the waning
