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Bliss—right now:
beneath a blue jade
vine’s beaded bangs,
my sonar function
asleep, the I unstressed,
a syllable glided over.
(Except wherever
in the line it’s placed,
the I is stressed.)
Behind me, a lipstick palm.
In front of me, the early
stages of sunrise,
the world before
highlighter’s applied.
Copyright © 2020 by Carol Moldaw. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 6, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
Leaves have no choice
but to articulate the wind:
aspens like zills, aglint and atilt;
the willow, a lone zither.
Riffling the cottonwoods at dusk,
winds find me cushioned against
the concrete in the open-air garage,
facing the trees, the drive, the road,
“Save your hands,” my mother says, seeing me untwist a jar’s tight cap— just the way she used to tell me not to let boys fool around, or feel my breasts: “keep them fresh for marriage,” as if they were a pair of actual fruit. I scoffed to think they could bruise, scuff, soften, rot, wither.
6. a patch of virga/a verse paragraph slant marks/slashing the sky/silvered in a shaft of sunlight/pellucid virgules marking time and pitch in a run of silent recitativo no skittering drops/no rivulets of rhyme shearing off the windshield/dripping from eaves from leaves/self-contained/this sheet of rain evaporates/is throttled/bottlenecked in the sky’s throat/never nears/never grazes/never wets/the tantalized ground virginal downpour/suspended mid-fall coitus interruptus/a phone call/a second thought/a punctured tire/a pummeled breast no/no/no/no/no the milk/won’t come/the seed/won’t pla