Alcohol, a vodka seems about right.
Cold bare shoulders and eyes
held open until the end.
I also recall a clavicle bone
that amuses me to think was lit
with the freshest quarter moon of light,
but it may have been only my eyes
dazzled by the two flips of holy berry
marking your front in feminine detail,
the moss further down warm to touch
like a Russian babushka hat.
I have it right, I know, when I recall
our stretch across the snow, the shadow,
the encroachment across the snow
of your tem porary warmth like a love affair
given to the cold winter just for asking.
Love and sex kept chained
and in separate cages.
After you pick through the afternoon
what is left belongs to me. Several hours
near the sea, walking fast, emptying streets.
The standoff quality of the quarter moon,
people illuminated faintly like a radio dial.
Forgotten thoughts and weather reports.
The small change of hours spent reading,
Street lamps light up yellow as cat eyes.
Platetonics, I suppose, account for distance,
the magnet of sonnets, signal flags torn down.
Plate and knife, chomping smile. A losing season
overtaken by secrets, false starts and sighs.
I am plump as a watermelon, shoots and stems,
the mysterious garden cabala, the sliding airway.
You and I still our favorite curvature on the earth.
Gleaning the word and stray phrase from copper ore,
from knots and twists, the spinning compass box,
from headwinds, from seed and cracked corn.
The chaste kiss in wind, exposure by candle light,
our night watch, our own shed kept in the universe.
Succumbed lovers. The first sign of rain in the limp
summer night. Wettened cherry, doused blossom.
The rail car is dim and quiet as a church.
Under my long black coat a sawed barrel.
I check an address, rehearse my plan.
Chuckle.
The get away car is a train.
A second train moves in the opposite
direction, the iron and glass very close,
destined to balance arrival with departure.
A solitary signal sends stray red light
into the rail car windows. No one talks.
The rail car riders never look toward me.
The uniformed sailor, the salesmen at cards,
the married, the kids with earphone wires.
The dim red light is magnified on the panes,
for a moment my face becomes beatitude.
I must appear like a pontiff in Argentina ,
or a fat don on the cobbled streets of Palermo
waving benignly with a faint white hand.
I am humbled by the strident pulse of love.
The shotgun shells can wait.
About the author:
Bernard Henrie won the Interboard Poetry Competition (IBPC) for January, 2005. Recent publications include MindFire Renew, Zafusy, Desert Moon Review, and Tertulia. Four of his poems were anthologized in the Wild Poetry Anthology. His first book of poetry, Letters From the Java Sea, will appear in Spring of 2005.
Henrie administered social service programs in Los Angeles County for 15 years before turning a hobby, currency trading, into a home based business. He lives at the edge of the Mojave Desert where he credits his daughter, Sabine, and new grandson Jacob with an often successful effort to keep him tethered to earth.
© 2009 Word Riot
