TurningYou never flinch when we lie down, your eyes
---------matching mine, step for step in the way figure skaters couple,
glide and dip. When I look too long into the dark I see
---------how desire swells in the mind in a long fomenting ache,
leaning toward what it thinks is its moment of transcendence
---------until it's poured back and pestled down
in the frail vessel of the body.
---------You want it that way, the empty stairway on the ward
where you work and that you insist we climb,
---------where a gallery of pigeons pace their awkward nests
in the opened skylight hanging over us,
---------their gurgled coos and clattering rush
battering the shaft of light that pins us there, pulsing
---------like huge monarchs, our wings unfurled.
You throw the future out
---------onto the bald carpet of our room; again and
again the coins reveal: Revolution.
---------When I touch you, the irises of your eyes begin
to float up like small planets, though you still come, hard,
---------down that slow river of stars, skin stretched tight
over the raft of your collarbones, your hips a reflexive cough.
---------You start lunching with a surgeon. He has small, hesitant teeth
and fine shirts, and you say he talks of the difficulties of opening bodies,
---------separating the lungs from the heart. Kidneys that are
like purses hard with jewels, livers slapped quivering
---------into steel pans, almost the size of small babies.
Together you walk the lawns at work,
---------feed the half-tamed crows and the many starlings
that fill the sky, black scratches on a bright mirror . . .
---------I can't stop myself from watching.
I sell my back as day labor, drive out the long wound
---------of highway laid down across the coastal range
to lose myself in the small clear bowl of a valley there,
---------chopping out the old orchards planted a century ago.
One night in November I lie in a hick-town hospital,
---------my shoulder rearranged when a branch I'd straddled
whipped and bucked with the force of a bull.
---------Stupid, slack-jawed, slathered in my own saliva and doused
with enough morphine to swim off down the hall
---------nosing the walls, I study the bad landscapes there—
dogwoods snowing over a riverbank, the liquid yellow grass
---------sprung through the Gothic ribs of rotting boats, then you—
just outside the window—coming for me, eyes on mine,
---------your nurse-whites unbuttoned, that black hair of yours
streaming out behind you, unwoven, wild,
---------that host of ravens at your back.
D. James Smith********************
RL
If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...
if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul
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