Tupelo Press 30/30 Project - Poems 11–15

Poem 11

[Under Revision]

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Poem 12

Winter Morning Walk

The wind biting

one side of cars,

every cross street

pushing it under

your coat, swirling

around the torso,

up through the arms.

Bad circulation pilfers

blood from your fingers

sooner than last season.

This must be

getting old. Plod

uphill, the bus stop

funnels the wind chill

in either direction.

Cold, inescapable cold

tightens the skin:

you know right where

your keys are. Clenching,

unclenching hands,

lowering the chin

to breathe the warm air

out, hang the wetness

leaving the body,

a promise of more

cold to come

but not now. Now

there is waiting.

This is not new.

Lately the letters

do not return

in the same month

you sent them,

not even months

that end in embers.

At this point

you could not

lick the stamp for fear

it will not stick.

But this is not

the hard part;

the hard part is seeing

soil harden, glass snap,

water turning white

and cracking underfoot,

a type and shadow

for skin, your skin.

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Poem 13

Blight

Snowflakes fall

through the night-colored windows

into and out of sight,

unaffecting from your looking place

where you raise your eyes,

lowering them again into so many words,

symbols of senseless things

never caught at the end of a tongue,

never melted in breath,

their comings and goings unknown

to the world’s insides.

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Poem 14

Setting

This evening holds nothing extraordinary. Not even the chives in my soup

are restless. All the major religions have heads on their shoulders again

and the pilot lights to all my old flames have gone out the open window.

I even had time to read today—a book, even. Imagine reading a book.

I met the author in college, a friend of a friend. She was older. Forty-something

pages into not being able to put her down, I read a letter she had chopped

into lines. It set me somewhere between spotting her name on a poster and peeking

through the blinds when I knew she’d be naked. Those hormones have ebbed,

mostly. She tells me about the moon: we are forlorn, she says, thanks to her place

in the sky, drawn to her majesty precisely because we can see it. There is no reflection

not conceding its surface to her at some angle. I was thinking about her tonight, wondering

which of my windows she’s chosen to smear as the soup steams itself back to sleep.

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Poem 15


Visible

A nearly full moon
Layers of ice under snow
Your breath in the air