Series: Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2015

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

A spit of rain, a shine
of metal in the middle of the desert—
Oasis of an idea the mind will trudge
all night to, for its promise: cleft
that opens in the rock at the touch
of the lips, with each finger’s
compressed longing.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

So small in the photograph:
one foot lifted, tip of a shoe
touching the back of a hot
and itchy calf, chin pointed
toward the window where the bees
hum their wayward psalms
and sparrows heed the instinct
to turn and wheel, beneath the sign
language of larger wings.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I imagine you
at the end of the line, your ear
cupped close to the receiver, a bud
on the cusp of bursting from sound.

And sounds skitter like birds
tumbled from a high wire, like spiders
shaken from slumber with the sudden
snap-open of umbrellas.

The syllables I form with my mouth,
you send back as slightly misshapen
echoes— as if a child tried to turn
a page with sticky fingers.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Spokes of light that sang over the valley,
spun flames that trembled like the wings of doves.

How did we walk all summer and into the next
season of rain? But we did, as if into the arms

of our most familiar, into the flesh of our everyday
fate. Did we have time to make garments out of our

recurring laments? We must have cried out in the heat,
in the cold; or clung to a bridegroom, an archipelago

of circling desires. Sometimes to wait is not an option.
Sometimes the only thing to do is hurry into the coming storm.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Pressed into a corner, she could not decline.
At the moment of greatest vulnerability,

was there another more blameworthy than herself?
For instance, the parent that had run to the store.

The emptiness of spare rooms, inhabited only
by furniture. That she liked pockets, hiding

away in a corner with a board book in hand?
How was she to know the welcome from

the unwelcome advance? Memory, such
an unreliable witness. And yet

every thin ferrule of grass hides a blade
springing up in the after-passage.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If the character had told the hungry children
they must earn their keep by begging in the streets,

if she had sold them surreptitiously
to the recruiter who wanted to know if they

were virgins; if the trail of bread or pebbles
shining in the moonlight was replaced

by coils of concertina wire, and the house
of sugar dreams boiled down into a soup

of rubber sap and insect wings— There’d be
no chance to buy time with a chicken bone

held up between the slats of a cage. Only the fire
would be a constant, a raging eager to be fed.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.