27
The sky was present before you were born: a bulbous purpling fruit, rising and falling in and out of the damp ocean, the metronome slightly off - days slightly obliquing and waning. For years: the tides and the sun and the scurry of blood-things across the lands and through the waters. These were all here before you: the needled trees nestling pine cones and the man drowning soil with asphalt; the salt-licked star fish siamese split and rebirth; the baying of leftover elephants after ivory slaughters, their stacked funeral stones and the cousin pyramids of fallen gods; the hollow, haggard sound of death – they were cycling lazily through the years and you were an egg in your mother's belly, ready for a breach. Wings tucked into shoulder blades and feathers flat against your spine, you breathed and the world replied, "o' Comely, Comely, don't you cry." After: the black without night, lovers without the breath of skin, stainless steel teeth, the slow churning circle of a crow. The decision,
twenty seven:
the year stalking closer
til flight
With or Without the Postman
The post used to be lover's code,
stamps and timestamps and envelopes
pale and left to be licked
sticky with lust
I've heard that
lovers used to stamp them closed
hot seal wax
and signatures
Wait weeks
spend hours
rereading
Reply behind their spouses' backs
on parchments,
holding the paper to their breasts
and passing it, sweaty palmed,
into couriers' hands
And I'm jealous.
What I'd give
for just one
love poem.
The sky was present before you were born: a bulbous purpling fruit, rising and falling in and out of the damp ocean, the metronome slightly off - days slightly obliquing and waning. For years: the tides and the sun and the scurry of blood-things across the lands and through the waters. These were all here before you: the needled trees nestling pine cones and the man drowning soil with asphalt; the salt-licked star fish siamese split and rebirth; the baying of leftover elephants after ivory slaughters, their stacked funeral stones and the cousin pyramids of fallen gods; the hollow, haggard sound of death – they were cycling lazily through the years and you were an egg in your mother's belly, ready for a breach. Wings tucked into shoulder blades and feathers flat against your spine, you breathed and the world replied, "o' Comely, Comely, don't you cry." After: the black without night, lovers without the breath of skin, stainless steel teeth, the slow churning circle of a crow. The decision,
twenty seven:
the year stalking closer
til flight
With or Without the Postman
The post used to be lover's code,
stamps and timestamps and envelopes
pale and left to be licked
sticky with lust
I've heard that
lovers used to stamp them closed
hot seal wax
and signatures
Wait weeks
spend hours
rereading
Reply behind their spouses' backs
on parchments,
holding the paper to their breasts
and passing it, sweaty palmed,
into couriers' hands
And I'm jealous.
What I'd give
for just one
love poem.
