Three fields from home on my way to you
I goggle at a brown minuet,
middle-aged voyeur of begetting so frenzied
it lives in mythic idiom
Wondering
how they know it’s time to replenish the earth
If their blood pricks like frostbite
If love lust desire
are not always a pleasure for them
as for us
Biting my thumb
at white-coated men with their clipboards
silver pens streaking
Remembering
my own white-coated complacence
its buttons of security
How I must have seemed as mad as any March hare
to you across the field, rival
of my old life
Kicking at encroaching love,
fruitlessly batting till the buttons dropped
with thumps as soft as rabbit paws:
do they lie here still
like tarnished tiny gravestones?
If so, let them lie. While the hares
leap and box. While the scientists jot their notes. While
my laughter nips the breeze, three fields from home,
on its way to you.
You want to teeter on the brink
of that first step
toward black water,
find yourself groundless,
persuasion a pink scarf
you tentatively finger.
A stranger’s crunching footstep
brought you to this perfect space
for drowning.
Remembering the taste of snow,
you don’t look back,
a cold so pure it burns
your only guide to seeing in the dark.
The only lover to ever embrace me
was Fat.
It clung to me like a needy child
I could neither put down
nor embrace. I tried to sell
the unwanted pounds: I held a
garage sale, and nobody came.
Those who would have been my customers
walked past with eyes averted, their arms
weighed down with their own needy burdens
that suckled them dry, and would never grow up,
or old, and so would never die.
I courted Fat assiduously, gave it the best years of my life:
performed acts with my tongue that men
can only dream of. In gratitude it nestled upon
my body with doglike devotion.
A man should be so faithful. A wife
should be so lucky.
My mother called them globs, these rings
around my middle. Rings they are indeed —
tokens of my early betrothal.
I would whisper
if you were here
this
that was born
in the echo of
your muscular voice as you stood,
poet at your pulpit,
Casting word nets to your hearers.
Later, on a bank of quiet dark
where we’d bared our feet
in a tea-colored stream,
It rippled like a fish in the moon-water:
I would have cupped it in my hands,
a gift to you.
My bed will not hold me. I sit,
forgetting sleep,
whispering this poem to
you who are absent, your crooked stride
breaking the grass
on the way to your own
templed verse.
Morning
And the day, unused
is as bare as the table
on which my hand rests
Blank of all but a cup of coffee
When the man I love enters
unshaven and unwashed
his yesterday clothes unslept in
In his hand a paper thick with scrawl
And tells me that in yesterday’s dawn
words came like wild ponies
Breaking long gates of silence
Whiffling wide-eyed
across the landscape of his brain
Their unappeased hooves
beating his fingers into cramp
Yet he kept on,
stacking syllables like fence posts
Till this morning
when he sat before me
My coffee cooling in its porcelain cup,
His hand flat upon the wrinkled page.
It doesn’t tremble with his voice
as the ponies flee his throat,
Walls falling to their timbre.
I am startled, humbled, gripped astride their saddles.
The lengthening silence after leaves a memory like hunger.
I reach out slowly, touch my fingertips to his,
The dust from spent hoofbeats tasting sweet in my mouth.
Lucie Winborne lives and works in Central Florida.
She writes with the goal of capturing a moment in time.
ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012
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