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My mother wouldn’t stand up
to wave. My father made certain
the door locked behind me.
But when I went for your door
you came too. Your mouth
made a flute of my arm,
its music a glass on the past.
My love, my love, went its song.
Now there is no need to leave.
Copyright © 2016 by Susan Wheeler. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
Green is the false nettle and green is its bloom and few are the tenders you pull from your room, fewest are the cinders that fall from your fire, the many times I wait at the sparking of desire, and full yearned, unsated you adopt a green regret, unfaithed a slopping kettle you in my love, beset.
The moon rose like a blooming flower. The tin in the hand clattered its charge. We walked by in the wavering hour, I looking away, you chattering hard. Met by luck, with like destinations, We startled again at what ended in pique. Strollers out, seeing us, had no notion; A car alarm cycled its querulous shriek; Eighth Street sank in the crack of its nightfall; You pressed your satisfactions on me. You in your urgency remarked after all Kindling your passion was enmity; Passion had finally erased your calm, Made composure a prop of the past.
The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air. The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn't care. When I came out to search for you the lauded hit the breeze On detonated packages the bard had built to please. The century was breaking and the blame was on default, The smallest mammal redolent of what was in the vault, The screeches shrill, the ink-lines full of interbred regret— When I walked out to look for you the toad had left his net.