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withdrawn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.
Laurie Lamon is the author of two poetry collections, both published by CavanKerry Press: The Fork Without Hunger, and Without Wings. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Plume, Ploughshares, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The Literary Review, and others. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. She holds the Amy Ryan Endowed professorship at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and she is poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling.
