Undercurrent

Lean over: there is something I must tell you.

To the current there is a hook, an undercurrent of darkness braided with light.

The bustle you are, somber & vivid.

The little receipt which is old fashioned like the tall laced boot of our town.

The name sticker “Margaret N. Cutt” to whom the used book belonged.

Your language, “O dear,” and “quite the town,”

Vivid lipstick out of the forties.

The overwrought city, the muscled imagination.

The bustle in a dress. Free-floating angst in ceiling chandeliers, & the purple sweater I have taken to sleeping in with wool circles like those a child draws on a blackboard, a child of ten:

Filmed

Marcella Goldsmith would understand.

Preparing for the stone city of age, myself I am slowing, never leveling

See in dream

Steps washed over by water,

The thin air of antiquity’s room

I reach for every twig for the nest

The storyteller with leukemia habits our planet still
unlike the poet who grieved his wife’s death it was years before he habited his own skin.

Landscape tonight fades into Federal gray as I turn out lamps on reading

Knowing I can never have you,

Knowing John Donne’s words, “If I dream I have you, I have you,”

Are true & untrue like a bird flying with one wing.

Not bogged down in sateen daughter

Chylde

Sister

But rising

To surge above the plains of rainy Tuesday.

Now will become later         like after the anguish of an infusion

Meantime Lindt Fioretto assorted chocolates

Stand in a round hatbox on my desk

& I start trying chocolate, moka doll hats on

With plumes

The plumes are “chocolat croquant” Caramel & hazelnut
we are two long-legged children in the attic on a dark day

Making lights

Revolve like at the planetarium:

A peacock & his hen:

I am the little drab one

Bringing up the rear

Bustle rustling

Am I the dark one serving the blonde one or are you the dark one serving me?

Roxbury Hall, Mass this would bow me to sateens:

Lady  Robe

I do not often rove but rove now

For whom I leave / for whom I love.

Duvet sale

A four season 550 loft power goosedown

Blowout                        Price-Slasher

“Sweet Dreams”

Dare I imagine us under it? How do I write? I open a vein.

Ink barely dry on the death certificate

Sharp as a tack if I’d sat on you in life I’d have bled:

This way it’s an uproar, an otherworldly bed:

Dream up a pillow fight, Paul Bunyan daughter

Feathers aglow an albino snow blown in a fan: I’m yours. You’re down:

Four posts, gold maple bedsteads:

Cold polishes lenses & silver pen nib

From swan.

No swan, tall woman, yet egret feathers would look good upon

A hat you wore tearing at drabness like a lion with roar:

Cape

Flung over shoulder with that bravado of a very large woman.

Just a touch of mascara

Diminishing such mirth would be

Like cutting off the hands with a blowtorch.

That touch

Is over the top

Too little

& too much

The way Sappho’s odes

Were unbearable

Yet not enough.

My shower restores me

Between bouts of loneliness

(Which strike now I am laid off work with a broken ankle)

Its colours sepia, silver salts, gelatins like an old photograph turned liquid

But its script is virginity: non stop

Vocal chords closing down.

Only two globes back

(Two “Globe & Mails” that is)

I received accolades:

Now, although I trace the alphabet faithfully with my wounded foot as the doctor tells me to, there is no full telling this thing, this loss.

Now in this gray convening

I pleaded with the covenanters

To move be in a New York moment

So I can be held with the wild language again.

The Lord of Diminuendo

Has come

Those small footsteps

Insistent

As the rain

Colours sweet

But so saturated

With the approach of spring

Like Leonardo’s Adam & God almost touching hands.

In The Fray Contributor