The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Alec Hershman
Doves
Rivery, obliged to swell, we saved our compass-thoughts for dawn: a church’s snow-mute roof,
the steeple like a needle, and the right angle of its shadow. Cream and age played lightly on our hands
to remind us of a difficult task we would not indulge with our attentions: as in a dream, the birthday card we had to sign
lay in a shallow pan of water, our wishes dulled by the words for them. We felt oblique dismay as when seeing turtles breathing terribly
in similar confinement overlapped. Just when the eave-most continent falls to the lawn’s erasure, we feel possessed of a carefulness
not used in time to spare the wingless things impatience, but grounded too by the notion we could rise.
Half Whisper
The purr of sugar as it spills to the floor. I can see the mice converge on the tinkle and gush of news like cash or scandal dropping. This is how to empty the walls, I thought, waking from a painted nap, the stripe of sweet trailing me into every room in which I worried the rodents might reside. I moved by hunches. On the couch I felt a light solution—demeanor of puddles, dream observance of wind. Then, in the kitchen again, was distortion on the range—silver allée between simmering pots, and a corner turned in my face. I like the fire, better, I think, because he’s the one here with me, not the away one, invisible to his very source. I think too to say so but the pots are hushing and one of them spits. You’re still here they say. It’s down beneath us that’s the oven. You missed.
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Painted were stalactites, stalagmites. Painted was how their curvy hazard was remembered in miniature as the sedulous mouths of ants— ants because there are smaller things than mice that must come first. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |