Find and share the perfect poems.
Now light turns the room a deep orange at dusk and you
think you are floating, but in truth you are falling, and the fall
is so slow, yet precise, like climbing a ladder of straw. Now
leaning forward, you open your hands that keep opening. Is
this what Yes feels like? Making a shore where no water was?
Copyright © 2017 Mark Irwin. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2017.
—Her fish scales, her chains, the woman’s headless
wings and blown
tunic of Parian marble. —The wet-see-thru
camisole. By sea she’s
arrived, lighting on the ship’s prow. One leg
thrust forward, the draped sails
When we could no longer walk or explore, we decided to wear
the maps and would sit talking, pointing to places, sometimes
touching mountains, canyons, deserts on each other’s body,
and that was how we fell in love again, sitting next to
each other in the home that was not our home, writing letters
with crooked words, crooked lines we handed back and forth,
the huge hours and spaces between us growing smaller and smaller.