Poems, Fall 2007

Distance

I am just a photograph

forever smiling into your eyes.

Just a fond memory,

worth only your half smile and

a finger run down the length

of my two dimensional body.

A girl you once knew.

I imagine how you look at me.

Detached, you muse on the mystery

of two people drawn together

and apart. You wonder

why you don't feel what you felt.

Photographs are not enough.

Love is written with fingers on skin,

by eyes constantly changing their light

in waves of expression.

Love is whispered,

warm,

just by your ear.

Known

When I told you I wanted to be an ocean  

I meant that I wanted to be your ocean.

I want to stop,

silent,

so you can touch the silk of my cool blue skin,

and see the pearls I've hidden

in the eel's small cave,

and under the orca's tongue.

Presence

When I wake up,

it's because something you said once

echoed.

And your palm print has never truly faded

from its place on my stomach.

From the moment we stopped

circling each other, watchful and

telling deep secrets with our eyes.

From the moment our unspoken,

before-it-all-begins language

became so audible,

I can still hear it.

At China Walls

Our fingers tightly intertwined,

you led me down inclines and

around jutting stones.

You brought me here.

We walk on a rocky floor,

circling small tide pools with their

quiet anemones,

and we watch the ocean.

It whispers its anguish --

pulsing and pushing and

black and blue.

It slaps and spits,

heartbroken and

exposed

beneath a swollen moon.

From Outside

Doors and all their slamming truths.

The finality of their locking, what hovers when they close,

glimpses of lives we could be living

stolen from their keyholes and the edges

of light that surround them.

Doors and leaving.

Doors and too much privacy and 

too much mystery.

If you would open just this one,

I might know it all.

I might have a new place to go.