DAWN PIECE
Small, rose fingers brush back his hair.
Tonight? she asks. More eyes than words.
For sure, he grunts, as if he heard.
His thigh finds hers, a silent dare.
Let’s call this gold, she says. This air
a song for today. Now we’ll gird
these loins. Your fingers brush my hair
til night clouds our eyes like old words.
His smile seems to kiss her white, bare
flesh when he stands. Low sun colors
his skin. She’ll miss his stick figure.
She won’t tell him that. It’s not fair
for roses to tint his wild hair
all night. She asks his eyes for words.
EXERCISE IN STYLE
1
You start to sketch water with your yellow
pencil, eraser tapping on your old desk.
It’s never still, though the dull pencil rests
for days at a time. You wish water slow,
or slower, but you know it wants to go
into the solitudes that seas offer—
to jump and dance in sunlight as one lone
drop. But, for an instant, falling back where
salt teases the whole. Your pictures can’t form.
Your hand is frozen. Like ice, it suffers
stillness. The cliff’s shape’s easy. The small hill
takes just one line—quick, not shaped by your skill—
it wears the shapes land always owns. Water
eludes all you’ve learned with its willful form.
2
Drawing water with a yellow pencil,
her hand shakes in the morning cool. She tries
to still it without stopping, to draw sky
broken by water’s motion. She can’t tell
if her quick lines catch the tempo, the swell
and fall of currents. Her hand’s not as swift
as that slick stream, sliding past. Her eyes still
stay fixed, but there’s something rushing she missed.
She stops. Looks up at creamy sky, the pine
bending over the stream. She’d like a cliff
but travel didn’t give her one. She’s armed
with shaking hands, slow eyes, and the sun-warmed
rock, cradling her rest. A leaping drop fits,
perfectly. Water moves. She’s still as time.
GLITCH
A day arrives without its week.
It seemed naked, an erased page
on a calendar time won’t greet.
We’re still as actors on a stage
with no lights, lines written out flat
in a prompt book with coded cues.
The day’s lost. Meals go wrong. A cat
parades past, chasing cut-out clues.
After/Thought Literary 