MORNING SWIM

Which loneliness is finest? Confections of nights
turned apricot mornings, afternoon naps and rooms

wrapped in velvet, and music pushing through birdshot
windows cracked up by little boy guns, bang smashes of boys

pouring out of the woods and fields in their yellow spark halos.
And if we do hunt the one thing we cannot kill, stumbling

on after its quickening heels, pulling up soft clots of earth
that is ours to ruin, what is the slowest, most roundabout way?

All of these years and ways I have loved you, bride to groom,
I’ve loved you best gone, away with your fires and cold ashes, your fat

and sated darlings, thirsty crew packed up
and gone from a kitchen full lipstick marks on empty cups

and overlapping, crooked rings on counters and floors where they sat
and sweated, full or half full of the taste, the curious taste,

the familiar, familial, family taste. Past misplaced cars and mysterious
bruises I kick and stroke and bubble my store of air.  I’ve loved you best

alone, unwed, in rented beds or spread out on a stranger’s grass
in the light between sleeping and waking, the almost-light, the blur

of the muted world, the world under water, unreal startling blue
of the pool’s deep floor or the blue-black currents of girlhood lakes,

face down in the water, over the slick weeds’ tangle and muck,
my strong legs kicking away from you, alive, alive and kicking. 

from the Southern Poetry Review

LEAF BY LEAF
                       (R.H., 1962-2001)      

Let the slugs take the hollyhocks, trash
the dank saucers of beer where they lay down in threes
and gorged, drowning in honeyed surrender,
the garden gnawed into swags of green lace leaf by leaf,
slick-toothed destroyers crawling the highway veins.
Let the body do what it wants, the belly
round out to its perfect globe, the breasts tumble forth
from their elastic vault. A woman I know has hung herself
in a sunset-colored dress, each of her closing requests
a tiny planet. A week ago we shared a glass
of wine.  Somebody folds her slender arms. 
Somebody makes a cross and kisses his thumb.
Somebody else makes sure her silver earrings
get to Lucy, gold to Joan.  Why not let the garden go
where it’s always been going, going, gone, down
in its wondrous excursion? June bug vs. hurricane,
and then the steady rain.  Your Honor I hereby relinquish,
whatever’s left in puddles then to vapor. Your Highness
I therefore yield. One of my tender rabbits to every stray. 
To each of your blue-black crows, a shining eye.

from Green Mountains Review

© Copyright, 2012, Pamela Gemin.
All rights reserved.