Early Morning

OUT OF SORTS

In the dumps, can’t write, out of sorts.
Look down at your feet.
Look at all that gravel
glistening in the late afternoon shower.
Each stone different,
little individuals.

Tufts of grass in between
and the cat out there stalking a trembling bird.
It’s a small world. 
It’s all there is and it’s all there, yet you’re not in it.
You’ve subtracted yourself from it,
refuse to take part.

And now the evening light, transparent lilac.
The sun’s out again. The big cloud
is pulled to one side, behind the trees, like a curtain opened.
The sun is shining on your self-stoked despair.
How can you turn down its smiling invitation?

OUT OF SORTS was originally published in Ambit magazine (no. 220)

STEEP YEARNING CURVE

Your voice is a flower
long-stemmed –
a lily voluptuous and alone. 
Or is it a rose
almost purple in the evening gloom,
a splash of blood 
against my living-room wall

in a late afternoon in late February
when the days also begin to
turn their heads towards the sun?

Your voice is a flower
tremulous and
quivering with thought.
A deep red flash,
deeper than deep
in the sombre light.

Not a brash sunflower,
looming like a yellow loudspeaker.

Or any little forest blooms, 
no matter how darling – 
anemones, primroses, bluebells, all serried ranks.

An iris maybe, thrusting upwards,
big mauve tongue, a morning flower?

The voice, la voix humaine, essence of being human.
Yes, I know birds sing
but do they really speak?

And I think of how the Dutch word for voice
Is ‘stem’.
And I think 
Of the slender shaft of your throat
And your head with its mass of curls.

I don’t need to look
for any other flower.

STEEP YEARNING CURVE originally appeared in The Stony Thursday Book no. 40 (ed. Mary O’Donnell)