Lucidity
One of you I willed into existence:
as though piecing together a dream—
mystery becoming science.
The other simply appeared:
pink lines like sun on the horizon—
a lazy afternoon, startled.
It doesn’t matter which is which.
Like sunsets or dreams, you both travel
beyond my mind’s grasp: too much
beauty for me to capture, or retain.
Creation is an artist; a mother
bears its miracles: dreamer, origin.
—
Nap Time
Underwear is strewn around me— Spiderman,
robots, cars. I have played the Transformers
theme song on YouTube three times today;
I keep picking up your underwear and throwing it
into the laundry basket. I keep boiling the kettle
and drinking more instant coffee.
I should be grading papers while you sleep, but I
write poetry. I think about how fragile this time is,
how blue veins of your eyelids thread over your
sleeping, dreaming eyes. How you probably dream
of Optimus Prime, or shooting webs from your fingers
while I shoot out my words, flimsy as they are,
trying (as everyone says) to capture this time because
it goes so fast. Mothers aren’t superheroes; we just battle
evil and laundry and time, powered on coffee and naps.
—
A summer night
Uniforms sloughed off,
skin slick with grease
from our summer jobs.
The moon’s pooled reflection
spread around us: fireflies,
stars throbbed into the hot tub.
Night was an adventure: inky;
studded with heat. The sun had weaved
its last light across the corn fields
and swooned into arms of sky
and your arms held me now: pale,
bare as the moon. We were as young
as the night was long, with nothing to do
but fill space and water with our light;
the hollow of your throat buzzing—
pulse of cricket legs, wrapped
in underwater song: hot as the stars
that surely burned for us.
No comments yet.