LAURIE LAMON

The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Laurie Lamon

You Should Write a Poem about That

Sunset poem, new baby poem,

poem of leaf and quail and black
shoes motionless at grave side;
poem of mouth and wrist where

someone let go last.
Poem of you-said I-said, poem
of oceans’ warming making cliffs
of ice crack loose—poem for

doubters, dancers, poem for sex
and love and why the sea’s
a dump. Poem for the girl-boy
walking home, poem for the apple

of their watcher’s eye.
Poem for cold-fist-voice of how
I love you unspeaks love,
shoves it like a shoulder into

cold: cold floor, cold name.
I’ll do it. I’ll write a poem
about a voice, a cry, first word,
last word, nest of birds that holds

to suppleness and heat and rain.
I’ll write a poem about lights lapping
at the base of island dusk, waves
moon-white and muscular,

the cemetery stone where I leave
a piece of pie or chocolate bar
and scrape the dried and matted grass
from the brass weather of my last name.

After Reading Marianne Moore

We were turning out lights when I heard
          you say, “I don’t want her
              in our bed,”

wanting instead the mind’s
          fanfare to close (like a nautilus
                   withdrawn

into its virtuosity of one,
          or the wind, non-denominational,
      a steeple parts). I wasn’t

done. I wanted to read for you nest
          and stone, divinity of fossil and gnomonic
      horn, Egyptian

needle, lizard and cocoon,
          a reading table’s seahorse, relic-
dry, a prize

outlasting our surmise
          and kill. Its coronet once slid and clicked,
      urging up toward

moon and warmer bed
          a single thought, a single
                    mate.