Ode, Aubade
And the morning, too,
falters,
struggles to
assert itself,
burn through
the errant
fog, the pines,
scorch the
whole grove
of trees
and crooked
streetlamps. Your
body’s turning,
turning
beside me
in my bed’s—
sprawl?
Badlands?
You sigh
on my neck.
Startled,
the crick
and sob buried inside it
like a pulsar
behind dust,
like a larva
in a bean,
want out.
Copyright © 2013 by Greg Wrenn . Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on March 25, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"This speaker sees his defining characteristics in the dawn: ambivalence, self-doubt, and a capacity for destruction. What is the consolation to be had on such a morning? Beside him is his restless, still-sleeping bedfellow—love's capacity for transformation, for pushing the human animal toward self-realization, temporarily abides."
—Greg Wrenn