Thursday, January 30, 2014

Poem: Betwixt


Betwixt

Diametric of a cardiac broomhead,
no lettuce in this, no rutabaga,
no osteothrombosis. Sometimes,
I wonder why we bother.

Jared walks the streets with a
spool of yellow string,
playing his life like a kite:
dentist, pawnshop, chowder hall,
cobbler. At the end of the
day, he retraces his route,
winding it all back.

Candace smiles,
stripe of snow in a ruby sandwich.
Jared, you marvel of a man.

Passersby freeze at the inequality,
this blatant mismatch,
tennis shoe, designer pumps,
insult to good sense.

 But they have no idea.

Deep in a grumble,
Jared scuffled the sands of
San Gregorio, following the
flight of a raven spied
Candace in a kaftan the
salmon of eastern
clouds at sunset.
A single loose thread,
trailing all the way down the cliff.

He ran to the base and
pulled, and pulled and pulled,
till she stood atop the
bread-dough bluff a
naked Aphrodite, holding the
last of the thread in her fist,
a capillary of fierce intent.


She scratched her number in
the hollow of a clamshell,
tied the thread to a
hole in the edge and
flung it over.


From the collection Fields of Satchmo

Plainsongs
Hastings College
Hastings, Nebraska

Photo by MJV

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