The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Patricia Davis

from The Water that Broke You, forthcoming this month from Finishing Line Press:

And Us Inside

Suppose it's not birth—our universe contracts,
expands instead in a slow
peristalsis. What creature do we nourish,

going back and forth
for coffee, extending, withdrawing
our hands? What can feed

on our love? A love, for example,
of steam, belly dancing off black coffee—

where does that slip off to, decades

from now, when the world takes
back our eyes? Quiet
stars. Dead or not, they shine. 

The trees just stand there and breathe. 
God, suspecting the burden
of brain, eyes, chose to be mist

pressed against a lake.
We take our next burning breath. 
The moon flowers, half rock, half light.

Aubade

night when the roof lifts off


and the walls fall away

and only the stars contain us

and dark threads beneath the eyelids 


and pulls the cover shut

and crickets sing to themselves

and wear out their wings in the grass


all that has ended 

each instant the mountains

are more themselves


roosters call to each other

like crippled songbirds

each second the stars


sink farther and the moon brays

in its barn made of light

One Sun, One Moon                

Tell me what your foot is for if it is not infinite . . . .

                                    — Francisco de Oraa

I.

Bougainvillea blossoms
on the street,
on the sidewalk,

in a sheaf
of dark hair.

The shadow
of the wrought-iron
chair on the patio tiles

makes a labyrinth.
Ants, each with

a tiny shadow,
crawl in and out of its
false walls. 

All day etchings
of night are before

us in the shape of
what we love.
As for my foot—

But I see the sun

splatter its script
on the sidewalk,
watch a bird

scrawl its flight
in shadow on the page.

II.

The sun writes
of what it can't touch,

Words, like
shadows, indicate

the outlines. We speak
in silhouettes, make
spider silk

of a bird call. 
If the skin

could speak it would
choose the sun's 
tongue—its flask

of light,
its stealthy

blundering love.
I once was wrapped
in loss. Grief

was my shoe,
my sidewalk.

Blossoms
purple the dirt,
glow from a crack

in the asphalt.
The sun makes silver

fruit of a leaf. 
I don't know
who is speaking.