notapoem

Sometimes a poem springs fully armed into the poet's head under the pressure of immediate experience, in the moment itself. But this isn't always so. More often it takes time to catch up with what we have grasped, sometimes fleetingly, 'back there'.

_____Author's note, Revolving Days, David Malouf





love is in the air, irenesuchocki

The currency of my days changes hands, shifting its weight from leg to leg- mind the pretty flowers that if broken the children will cry for- with two hands out in front of me i wait for undeserved chances at full moons and kissing breasts and smiling in the ways i remember from youth, when currency was less measured in time, in dominion, in scent
____and gravity, that once wreaked havoc on Pisa and astronauts and daydreamers, suddenly retreats back to a cave (or a oncelover's chest waiting for the next episode) and leaves me amongst fish bones and tideless seas- and i wake in the morning, feeling like the only grain of sand to open its eyes smack bang in the middle of the Sahara, silent, alone, with too much to see that i can't quite grasp at
____Here is the tea i've waited for. The girl smiles, puts it besides my hand and walks away- a blur of pink hair and femininity and the scent of jasmine (from the tea or her i won't ever know) that form in her now.absence a silent music for longing, and want, and daydream (which now that gravity's gone can rise like feathers from dusty volcanoes)
____beneath all this i sit, tortoise as far as life goes. Unlived youth. Unmarried. Ununderstood. Unmanaged. And run the ink of my pens against history and geology and memory and the study of my own demise. (I crumble the paper later and throw it from the volcano where it rises as a feather and later turns into a star.