New Poem

Please scroll down two posts to One Stop/Magpie poem.  Do read this one if you've time.  Thanks!  xxxj

Cheval and I Dream in the Wind

I braid and unbraid my fingers in the dark

Demanding of that cave where I rest

Why was there never

A marriage or a child. 

 

The dark has nothing to say to me

Except to make a bouquet of shadows. 

Sleep won’t be coerced

And the pillows are heavy and hard

And there is the high-voiced

Tender lance of the wind,

Slicing in from the Wyoming border.

Sometimes I want to flag down

Some jaded trucker

And be taken away

But I am on the highway of shadows

Of impossibility.

As my father once said, in the “twilight”

The crepuscule, perhaps the last decade

If that, or, burning up time as Gallager says,

“like a madwoman eating pearls”

Flour and salt call to me

From the cupboard.

I could lay my woman’s hands on these things,

The butter, the canned peaches

To make something

Where my sadness was

I have given in to the sorrows

That gleam on their strand,

Pearls around my throat.  My loquacity

Is my shield but I burn

And hide

Here in the familiar dark room

I return and return to,

Waiting to be reborn.

  

ii

Worse than my angst:

No one has come to release cheval d’or

From his run.  He dies inside

And no one sees this

But I, the neighbor who comes and goes

In her white beaten up truck.  I imagine

Taking my walker

Down the stairs and bracing myself

To drag my leg with me into the  barn

Unlatching the door to the stall

So that Cheval steps out.

He would look at me with his deep velvet eyes

And nose me to learn my name

And my purpose.

I would tell him that he is to leave

Under cover of the dark

Gathering up mares along the way

As if he would not reach the freeway

Where the ghost ships of the night,

The rigs hauling goods from the edges of the world

Would mow him down.

Iii

Once I sought transfiguration

In someone’s arms.

It was afternoon, two voices

Pouring from the radio

Love scene Act I, La Boheme.

My lover’s kisses

Broke me open.  He parted my legs

And wrote his name upon me

And I shuddered in delight

And then I was alone,

And my sorrow came back.

In a bed born along by a dream-wind

Out into emerald oceans

Reunited with a family healed

My mother and father’s dark hair

My brother’s laughter.

I am not lost, all is not lost

But the well of tears, the dearth

The living on empty-armed.


xx


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
2011