Meteors #1

We've been apart

so long

our hearts' embroidery

has torn.

Let this meteor

be the thread,

our love
become the needle.
                
Meteors #2

I am so happy in these seconds

I watch this meteor this freight

of light hurry with such purpose

across the night it seems nothing
can replace it.

Meteors #3

Stroking
Your soft hair
Meteors

Unzipping
Night's
Dress    

Meteors #4

Such child joy with you.

Meteors: Stitches
In our sides

From laughing.

Meteors #5

We're hung
to death
with nevers,
Love.

Let's
this once

shine
                        anywhere
in the sky
        we

please.

MOCKINGBIRD CHICKS
                for Marcia Lipson

Little two-thumbnails.

Little burrowing heads-
        old-man-tufty-balds,

like skinny ladle-nest fulls of
        three plum pits.

                *
                Little past-lived-voices.
                                Little soul-seed-
                        creature-once-weres
                transformed
                                        into mockingbirds souls.

                *       
 Oh little breath-suns.         
                Oh little stick-sack bodies,

        breathing
                softly,
                   so

              softly.  

                *

JULY
                        
When I was alive in the small of your back,
by your swoonish whims by the soft crying trees,
Love, that city unafraid for you,
Love spoke to us in its many voices.
Head bowed under snowy music,
a newt searching for its daughter by the sea,
whispering like a hunted, hungry lost wife,
Love led you to the things you'd missed,
the raft of its enraptured heart
setting down its Mississippi of stars.

When I was alive in the small of your back,
streets blurred thin in the gaslight mist.              
Trees touched each other in the whispers of leaves,
and you snuck into my saddlebag heart,
a velvet lamb in a puff of smoke,
her broken toys following, lost in the woods,
as my fragrant nerves leaned, loosed in the wind,
and my sooty bones felt their fresh rats at play.

When I was alive in the small of your back      
a summer's worth of lifetimes ago,
blowing all over the things I missed,
dozing in a dreamy halo of milk,
the daddy day lily yellowed me in its ashes
by the nest of clematis in its pastel rooms.
My father was a shadow under maple leaves.
My mother slipped further into chocolate sadness.
My sister sung lullabies to lawyers and missiles,
and I was cousin to the larvae where the frozen world slept,
where the dagger grey shore blew in from its dreams,
windows rolled down, its flying car gleaming.                                   

When I was alive in the small of your back,
hapless as a punch drunk willow tree,   
frog songs bulged through the leafy air.
The mint startled us by the springs of grass,   
as the loosening began and chimed in our tongues,
in the droughty winds of lisping winter,
like a lonely cuspidor of undulating hums.

When I was alive in the small of your back
the brush of your hair fell heavenward,
and you smelled me in the trees by the waving umbrellas.
You darkened me in palm fronds and believed me in the end.
You trimmed me out in a sparkling black coat,
a stiffening chimney, bursting with ash.
I yearned in the simpering mulch of fall rain
for the quarter moon borne away on its litter,
before the whump whump shushes of distant thunder,
as you, my queen, my sleeping swan,
dynasties of melting snow on your arms,
drew me back to the willow's frail light
on the galloping horses of heartsongs and bones.

STUART LISHAN'S poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review,
Barrow Street, Arts & Letters, and Xconnect.  He teaches literature at The Ohio State University.

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