Packing Up the Journal
Black, faux-leather cover with gold trim—
a bit beaten up, smudged pages and erasures.
Thirty-six years ago, her best and only
companion, jammed so long in the bookcase
just waiting for the person she once was to return,
all the while holding in abeyance the pages
and pencil smears of one who faced the world
alone, armored in sandals and a yellow dress.
How to bury in a box what was once so alive?
How to pack, squeeze the days, each bigger
than a month, so that they fit without crying?
How to hush the hunger of I want I want?
How to stow away the backdrop of the grand
adventure of her life? Look, she can still see
the apricot tree by the whitewashed steps,
bouganvillea gushing fuchsia and purples
over the walls. And there’s green-eyed Alekos
in the red truck, and old Trifon crushing a leaf
and offering in his open palms the sure scent
of Eden. And once again, the night of the wild sea
and the beach where she saw, over love’s insistent
shoulder, an explosion of stars, a burning that
these pages of cursive loops and circles of scribble
rushed to capture, lasso down, and bring home.
Bliss
with help from Keats’s Endymion
I admit it shocked me for he never
used that term before. A fitting word
for our afternoon’s afterglow, yes,
but why was I so taken aback?
Perhaps it was his saying it aloud,
for doesn’t that word belong to
another age—a quieter time
of propriety and scented letters?
Keats. An open casement window,
face half-lit by moonlight, head filled
with the sweet of eglantine, spinning
out the words quickened from hours
of sleeplessness and hot imaginings.
A hillock of violets. A breast.
A trembling.
Bliss, of course, but for us
in our new posturepedic bed
bought for my bad back? For the c-pap
on his night stand? The bottles
of eye drops, nose sprays?
Socks strewn across the floor?
But bliss he said. And bliss his half-
closed eyes bespoke. While I who couldn’t
wrap my head around his saying it,
let alone believing it, and at his age!
bit my tongue and said nothing.
Truth tell, it’s I who suffer lack of words,
who borrows from another poet’s page
to make of my heart an open book.
But who must confess to outright crime
in order to say, if not bliss
then of our thirty years together,
it’s him, from whom my being sips /
Such darling essence. Oh glorious theft.
Oh plunder, to be ever in these arms.
