Wednesday, July 28, 2010

calendar

Impatient with time, my hands open and close.
My fingers determined, my fingers ready to touch your skin
in warm yellow latesummer light, ready
to keep warm under the cold evergreen burn.

I distract myself with purchasing books, reading perhaps half at best,
stories by Dennis Johnson, poetry by Whitman, his disciple, Hart Crane;
and minimalist novels which speak to my slowed-down heart.

Inside my chest there's a dull thudding in time
with the opening and closing,
replaced by a latent smashing in the night

when you visit me in my sleep, when you crawl in bed with my sleeping self.
Your whispering floods my dreams with pages we haven't filled yet;
I wake only to knock an inkwell over on my sheets,

which is, with my morning cough-cough-wheeze, a true catastrophe.
You're not here yet. The calendar
has nearly a whole month to move. But the birds are singing.
The midsummer sky expands, a soft sailor's blue,
and the clear wind barely more than a breeze.

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