AndyPosner.org

People

Andy 1 min read
poetry
People
Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash

Falling in love is like swallowing grains of sand
to recover the pebble you skipped across the pond

by your childhood home, the ripples setting in
motion every marvel, every horror of your life;

except the grain touches your tongue, you close
your eyes, and the world becomes one ripple

with neither pebble nor shore in sight; and your
throat fills, not with sand but the sweetest tea;

and you find that you don’t have eyes or mouth
or body: that you are eyes and mouth and body;

and though you are old enough to know that
people are cruel, and selfish, and hypocritical,

and, only every so often, marvelous, you lift
every stone you encounter, pull back each

curtain, page the back-issues of magazines
and newspapers: you search for love in every

dark, flickering, uncaring atom of the cosmos
because you are dark, flickering, uncaring; and

because you are matter, you matter; and because
you are time, you have all the time to attempt to

recover that improbable spark which, nigh-on
fourteen-billion-years hence, still has you saying

I love you, dearest one. May I have this dance?

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Ages ago I kept a diary in a hand legible to
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rain clings to pinecones like wet feathers,
the evening slips into its velvet gown,

and starlight pitter-patters on my head
like drops of gallium. I am thankful

the day is dying, for I have forgotten how
to live. Who wrote those words belongs

to an empire that collapsed under its
own grandiose weight, its high priest

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I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
flapping against the sky and recalling that I am sky. Once,
the book well-thumbed and creased and read twice over,
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Foul Weather Friend

I am a foul weather friend, dear poetry.
I have paid you no mind when spring rains
wash clean the marble statues of gods
and a cheery sun
reads aloud your sweet inscriptions,
nor when awed children skip through museums,
nor accordion-song fills the subway,
nor a stranger does another stranger
a kindness,
nor blueberries are so ripe they bleed sugar,
nor velvet chocolate cake knocks you dizzy with love,
nor, after making love, my wife’s perfume
clings

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