While My Daughter Doesn't Nap
Poem for June #2
Where are the birds? My husband asks watching a grasshopper on the fence.
The cat curled into the sun.
I jumped the other evening, new moon, a dead lizard on the path.
I never ended up saying everything I wanted to say.
That a blue room is more than a blue room. That there was rain in the dream and we were trying to find a place to eat that was open and had nobody smoking. The TV on and a boy going table to table. That there were thin pancakes with blueberries, and the fisherman stood in the neon light in the kitchen always with water around his feet. That there was a white horse I was supposed to ride bareback, the man holding the reins dark like you and the land I loved sprawling beside me. Her fur thick and white and gray spotted. And I said she is going to buck, taking the rope in my hands, and she did. Taring along the mountains without me. That when you raised my nightgown in the desert in the heat and tapped my hip in your sleep and said who is this who is this? It devastated me. That at least the carpenter had opened his eyes and said Oh I was just dreaming about you. Before Duke’s was gone and you could still get breakfast on Sunset Boulevard. I wanted to make poems the way people embroidered and planted and cooked, as if I was patching up a pair of blue jeans, biting the thread, handing them back to you.
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I am joining my friend and incredible poet Ingrid in her poem a day for June challenge. Maybe you’ll join us too.