Romantic Gestures
One pressed me against a white oak,
its branches preparing to hand down the evening,
lengthening like my shoulder blades the possibilities
of that intersection between normal
and beautiful. This quiet day surprised by intrusion,
a front door’s insistence on the outside,
wide as anyone’s comprehension of it,
beautiful as a dress, and the tree
was a way of speaking, and up through the limbs
hung a distance of blues and whites.
What else should I remember? There were blooms
whose petals felt like flesh,
the flesh of a hand, or a mouth, petals
cream at the tip, their desperate move
toward the sepal, the ovary, that
fevered the cream to a pink; but still,
What white oak? What afternoon?
The body’s inability to be a part
of the popular world. So, I would like to say,
so, I let the dress fall open,
I let go of my dress, we opened the dress
together, as if uprooting flowers,
as if for a moment its pattern of dogwood
began a bloom, and now the landscape
was inside it, this ceremony
of the dress, how it could become
a little diaphanous threshold
against the rational world of things.
Bringing Desire to the Fields
The farmer makes love to his wife in the field
to impress the achromatic land, to undo
its sullen mood. He’s chosen a late afternoon,
and under the vast return of the crows
and under the imagined shade, the region’s cool firma
is their terra incognita. They’ve walked forty steps down
past the Allis Chalmers. Out to reimagine
the cusp of season, the nuptial knot.
As yet there are no leaves upon the trees
to rustle, no vegetation spreading
like caprice across the fields.
What is this unfeasible something,
this stem of wish, this weird appetite?
Just yesterday the children shook like they were
made from sugar, and something wrote
words into his dream, to fill the land with your
geography. He’s afraid his mind’s too tired
from working the ungiving acres. What’s to lose?
He sees now where her cotton dress
becomes a brook stream in this light, the air
as thin as kitchen breeze. Her body
a brook trout. Their acreage uncircumscribed.
Reader, I may have fallen
in love with the farmer. The hills beyond the couple
baffle themselves slowly. What a world
to want to run after. This promise
back to the garden. His thoughts while they are resting.
She’s only imagining, stalks of yellow
flowers flush and frilled and rippling, and a song
of hours. On this and all the world’s resources,
she lingers, lit up like a votive.
