Stephen Ackerman

While Another Dove Nude into the Breakers
January 25, 2023 Ackerman Stephen

While Another Dove Nude into the Breakers

 

One talked with a talisman
hung round her neck

 

One scattered ash in a spot
sacred to one other

 

One wandered among scrub pine
and heard surf through the trees

 

One slept in the dunes
under noon sun

 

One saw a freighter
just off the coast

 

The baleen were diving
in its iron wake

 

One brushed the hair from her eyes
with the back of her hand

 

Like a gardener
while another tucked a pencil

 

Behind his ear
like a carpenter

 

One said of a city:
save it for us

 

Though they never entered
that city together

 

One laid a watch at his feet
and said: time is a river

 

One hung a yellow diablo
from his rear view mirror

 

One stopped in a stairwell
to declare her love

 

One opened a diary
and found a blank entry

 

And turned the page
to wander after her

 

One traveled with a hound
as gray as smoke at her side

 

One climbed a mountain
called Cloud Splitter

 

While another dove nude
into the breakers

 

One married in a Memphis monsoon
and the same one refused to marry

 

No matter how June the day
and fair

 

One said there is no twilight
like a Memphis twilight

 

The sky lavender and river
on the last pale blue day of summer

 

One beheld the rice paddies of Arkansas
one saw egrets like white fruit

 

Flocked in the branches of a tree
at Moon Lake, in Mississippi

 

While another watched the sun
spin grass into gold

 

And the same one beheld turbines
harvest the wind

 

And passed wash after wash empty of water
Blind Hills, Black Canyon, Dead River

 

It was dry season
the green grass gold in the sun

 

One beheld a woman behold
the egrets arrayed in the tree like a strand of pearls

 

One woman wore the strand
in the green gold grass in the sun

 

One loved a woman
who had been loved by a man

 

When they were young
when she was a diver in the breakers

 

Two men loved a woman who grew her hair long
even in summer

 

One watched in a fever of desire
watched her lean by the river

 

Watched her take water from the river
that she poured from beaker to beaker

 

As she poured her love
from one glass into another

 

From lover to lover

Stephen Ackerman‘s debut poetry collection, Late Life, won the 2020 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2022. More information about Late Life can be found at stephenackermanpoetry.com. His manuscript-in-progress, A Rain Oration, includes three poems originally published in Plume (“Happiness on Earth”; “I Was Reading the Sunlight, I Was Planting the Words on this Page”; and “While Another Dove Nude into the Breakers”). His poem “If I Had as Many Hands as Vishnu” was set to music by Max Raimi, a composer and violist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The piece is scheduled to be performed in March 2025 as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music Series. His poems have appeared in many print and online publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2010, Boulevard, Harper’s Magazine, The Manhattan Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Salamander and Verse Daily.