SOLUTION
Broken bottles, blue shards strewn, staining the grass the color of a dark night sky where the sun shines through them. I am barefoot. I think of protection – how shoes shelter, surround, create safety in a world that is glitteringly dangerous, blood everywhere. I am tracking it as I walk this trail that is not trail, covered over with weeds, scattered with someone’s red anger thrown against sharp rocks, meant to shave, slice, sever, the smell of molten rock and sulpher hanging in the air. You are the one I should talk to about this but you are gone, trailing your lime scent and thoughts behind you, the door open, not even a note left behind. Overhead the trees whisper to one another, stretch their heavily-leaved boughs over my head. I am at home here. If I lay myself down, come Fall they will cover me leaf by leaf and I? I become a home to flies and bugs and worms, feeding them fat and full.
I am not afraid
I walk solo with care
my choice is my own
Where there were two, now there is one. I bind my feet, slip into sandles, backtrack to a place I have never before seen.
BLUE
(this is an older poem, self-published in my chapbook, Shift.
It feels like a good fit/followup to the new poem above)
I am blue
glass goblet of white wine
sweet as kisses on your breast;
midnight sky dancing with planets;
broad daylight and candy-
cotton clouds.
I am blue
strings on a sad guitar;
voice of too many cigarettes, too
late nights and unknown lovers;
stones in the road
hurting naked feet that
lost their shoes sometime before.
I am blue
diamonds;
ice dry as desert’s scorching
breath at noon below a
hazy sun;
bruises on your thigh;
I am blue
shards of broken moonlight
at the cave’s moist mouth;
come,
dip your fingers
into my
falling water
and let me lick
them clean.
1 Comment
This is a beautiful read. Wonderful rhythm, the placement and length of each sentence is like a dance.
And I remember Blue from that chapbook. Still lovely, lovely. I am truly a fan.