sw00200p-poem30s2

Postures 2007:  #30 from Side Two



"Between / Within"


Rising, falling, the leaves could not quite cross
His window's length, and now the wind wrinkled
Less and less those spades.  There would be dying
Even there.  He tries to forget that water
Closing over her, that torrid distance
Through night brightened by the suck and whine of fire.

But how?  Under what should orange fire
Be hidden?  Under the weight of a cross?
Clenching his pillow to stuff the distance
Of total blindness into his wrinkled
Eyes, distance to shut away water,
Fire, he wrestles with what has no dying

Outside of--sleep, hurls his pillow; and dying
With the wind, arches over his bed, a fire
Himself, choking.  Singing beside the water
That night, was it so, where neither one could cross,
Enter, crumpling toward the ashes, as wrinkled
Again, he squirms on his sheet?  Distance,

Distance?  I saw him drop.  I know the distance;
But the heart?  If his body were dying,
My senses wouldn't be so lost, wrinkled;
But it's mostly his heart which remembers the fire
And whatever barrier he did not cross,
Yet feels he should have.  She used to water

That wildflower on our desk.  Tom watched her water
It often, having brought it a moon's distance
After all, for her.  He looks at the cross
Above it: her gift.  Cross, plant: dying
Unites them too, now.  With no divined fire
To keep earth's creatures green, they have wrinkled

In their thirst.  He rises--as his wrinkled
Bedding shows.  Shall I follow him: to the water,
The North Platte, where that orange fire
Sparked the green to black; or any distance?
His heart is his, not mine; his dying--.
Falling, rising; Tom, Sharon, flower, cross--

Between these a confusing, wrinkled distance
Conjures a wall: the water of their dying,
And that human kind of fire/ he has yet to cross. 





-------
Brian A. J. Salchert