Ode To A Pair Of Faded Levis
Levis, circa 2000, unearthed today
You were young when I wasn't yet
wounded into the bitter taste of burnt love
letters. So I wore you often, pulling on
your brass zipper, certain that life too
coheres, takes the form one gives it.
Now, years later, we meet again, dear Levis, as I clean the closets, prepare myself for another departure. Hoping to feel the youth who spent days in your easy shell, I propel, with difficulty, my legs down your frayed length, your cloth now as flimsy as my picket fence dreams were then, and too small, the arms of your waist, much too small to contain this belly, which has since swollen1 with the dark knowledge of pain.
[1] And more prosaically, with all the junk food that gets eaten in windowless rooms in the course of 14 hr work days.
My Poems
... link (one comment) ... comment
Calf Light
You have placed signs of me everywhere.
The stones I gave you on the shelf, in the shadow
of the old photograph, the banded half-moon
piece of agate, on a ribbon, between your breasts.
My room at dawn with its scattering of books and crumpled sheets, on the contrary, is as unadorned as it was at the beginning. Even the bouquet of grass that I placed for you in an empty pickle bottle has gone to rust. Yet, this this calf light at the window, which rubbed against me to awaken me, is the rose of your mouth.
My Poems
... link (no comments) ... comment
A Question
Lying in grass, the spring chill barely
kept out by the thin jacket in which we are
half covered, half exposed, my arms wrapped
around your waist, a shade of crabapple blossom,
I wonder if that boy, who gazed at the lumbering rainclouds through the thorny neredu tree, located in that faraway plateau country, many years ago ever even thought he would come to this season?
My Poems
... link (no comments) ... comment