Some Days
When you’re away, I cannot count
my fingers, clumped into a fist.
Days slide like pennies in a drawer.
I’m like the man who fell
headfirst on the stony path
and lost his numbers. Couldn’t count
the days to Friday or add
the nickels in his pocket. Seconds
blurred and minutes wouldn’t pass.
When you come back, I count
grapes and sips of wine. Each minute
says its name too clearly, each day
steps away, one two, one two,
and then it’s gone.
Blue Nudes
1. The Dyer’s Hands
Matisse prepared huge sheets of paper
for his cutouts, painting them the solid
blue of crayons, of his water jug, then sliced
in with his ten-inch shears. His hands, stained blue,
shaped dancing bodies, caressed the thick blue
paper into long slow ovals,
making our bodies think that his idea
of a body was the first one, and the best.
His dancers move like greyhounds, like blue
flutes that bend into their low notes, then curve
out again; we stretch our hands into the moonlight,
hoping to see blue.
2. Our Hands
My hands, your hands, assume the color
of each other’s bodies in the streetlight’s
acrid gold. At dawn, our skins are simplified
to blue, so pure, so softly curved you’d think
that we could stretch into the dancer’s lean
blue shapes, love softening our querulous
aging flesh. You stroke my back where I cannot
reach, so gently I wonder if the touch
is yours, or the pure blue light.
Peaches
1.
Peaches on a blue plate, on blue linen,
ripening as slowly as the sun
fades into night. Sometimes wind will make them
fall so softly that they lie unbruised
among the rough grass, the knobby roots.
I’d like to cut ripe peaches for you,
lay one bright crescent, then another
on your tongue so you could squeeze the juice
around your mouth, then kiss me.
2.
The sage who counseled “Live in the exact
center of each moment” must have had one
ripe peach in mind, in hand, his mouth
dry from trying to say “no” so gently
to Desire, in late August when the lightest
touch on rosemary or basil sends sharp
perfume into the air like smoke, so willing
to diffuse itself into the dry heat.
On waking every hour
Trickster moonlight spreads like ice
across the leaves, leaving my
bewildered skin to wonder how
to sleep when the moon swells
to a ball of ice, then melts,
pouring light that behaves like water
on piping birds, vines knotted at
our window, and your exhausted arms.
Leaves, skin, and the fields beyond us
dip and coil in the moon’s glaze that
settles, thick as the iced river, on our bed.
We shift and whisper into sleep;
I count your breaths while the wet moon
spills itself on sleeping birds,
startling them into song before my
shadow unfolds on the loose air of dawn.
On the gift of a photograph
Thank you for the picture of November roses,
unmarked by frost. Thanks for telling me
about Andre Kertesz, and how in 1915
he snapped two Polish soldiers on their field latrine,
and how he kept their dignity clean and useful
like the straw they clutched.
One story says that Kertesz sent the photo
to one soldier’s widow. Not likely—but if he did,
I bet she thanked him for believing that a man’s
last printed moment is worth keeping,
even if his pants are down.
I’ve stopped editing the awkward moments from our
life-film—our yawns, snores, belches, silences, leaving
them intact beside our loving
