Proxima
This, precious demon, is how you caught me
the sweetest pricks
the pinching of strings
lamps slanting their ivory outpour
across polished brazil nut skin
reflecting a line like a frozen finger
of lightning
the artist’s finger
on the warbling string
a bottom lip
quivering
no matter how softly
she strokes the violin
there is not a sound
the walls don’t hear
the keening
of your hopeless, stranded
melody
a river for my ears striking me
where I stood
carrying the bundle
of me into new years
where the sweetness of you
cradles me
through yet another century
of longing to be
near the gaping mouth
of that hourglass body
from which the hum
of exquisite perplexity
sighs through me
oh cracking melody
I can’t even move
while you torment me
so gingerly
so precisely
the sweep of a thumb
along the bass’s strings
a pulsing
in my paralyzed neck
oh, how I want to be
caught in your ripening eternity
tell me what to be
tell me, because I have forgotten
I am me
pluck me
along the sharpening
of your soprano legato
where I long to be the strings
the bow strokes
so keenly
teach me to be air
and you will see how I can sing
when underwater
and still breathing
the perfume
into which you refine me
your story will never leave
twisting me, pulling
me into the glossy conch shells
your eyes are becoming
where I am spiraling
I flail but the railing
too is flying
away into the bubbly
sky
the moon a raspberry
in this honey-spilled
sea
of awakening
and like the sea
you smell like something
heavy and breathing
like the sea, you drench me
with tugging and pressing
but starting from my mind
and only then
dampening down
toward sand-mired feet
I am crooked
in the slanted sliding of
your uneasy embrace
where you kiss me gently like a truck
wrapping around the tree
after leaning
across the twin yellow snakes
your arms are the roots
of my fire
your legs the sapphire branches
of thrumming dragon
fly wings
you are cedar on the tongue
of poetic intrigue
and if anything
like my own creativity
you swelled and aged
into everything your mother hoped
you would never be
but I love the very taste
of your daring
ingenuity
do you feel these inverted peaks
of harmony?
this is how your bass
will slam through me
stretched frequencies
draping our shapes
and humming through us
like bees
like sunlight in a jar
you are trapped
so long as I do not move
like sunlight you are slippery
as I fall forward into this dream
you fall with me
what I’m trying to tell you is
you struck all the right chords in me
there was no flower, there were no bees
yet still you made honey from me
this glass crystallizing in the corners
of my eyes mean I fear
I may never
hear you again
This poem was published by La Piccioletta Barca, February 2020
