You are the crab sidling out
from under another, to nip
the fingers closing in with tongs.
You are the kiss walking away
without so much as another glance.
You are the pair caught on camera
pretending to help the fallen one,
then rifling his backpack for cash.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Assassin’s Wake
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Hi Luisa–
Must say that I don’t blame the crab, with those tongs coming closer…
Love this, each portrait true as rain.
HER DREAD
“You are the kiss walking away/without so much as another glance.”
When you find me, and I know you will,
but I would have withered in the search,
like these brittle leaves and broken twigs,
how would I hold you to your promise?
Like those hungry ghosts in Yunnan,
would you haunt these forests for a touch
of where my heart pounds, my breasts,
and growl your hunger away, satiated?
You promised you would kiss each leaf,
each fallen twig, each broken branch
to find me. But what if you were the kiss
walking away and would not even glance?
—Albert B. Casuga
08-11-11