#nakedbirch

[rustytrout]

Nightmares I once wept

Onto your shoulders, which my

Body would live, feel.

[rustytrout]

We drove past Druid

Hill, your head was in my lap

Do you remember?

[rustytrout]

Collecting: poems,

silver bracelets, flannel shirts,

useless cords, small deaths

[rustytrout]

Shut me inside of 

a white oyster shell, asleep, 

impenetrable

[rustytrout]

If I concentrate

I can feel the veins next to

my heart pant and flex

[rustytrout]

Anatomy

Two blue flooded earths-

dark, ocean permeated spheres,

a lunar eclipse black and ringed with gold at their centers,

passing over the meridian,

then mud under moss streaked into eyebrows,

tear ducts are Chesapeake tributaries

poured over oyster shell teeth and 

lips unfolding like lilies

over beach grass ends of hair, 

throat moans like a reed where

neckshoulderscollarbonebreast are cast with wax into sunlit orange metal

freckled with verdigris

spread onto arms stretching out like branches from a trunk

(holding a child's weight and swinging legs),narrow branches of a sapling 

fingers long and cracking,

stomach is the bend in a sand dunes shaped by hurricane winds, 

before the hips roll into Blue Ridge Mountains, 

and thighs curve into valleys at the back of the knees,

straight calves carved out of pink quartz

held up by birch tree ankles (solid, strong)

coloring the Palisades white and green,

feet are roots pressing themselves into the earth.

 (what do you wish you were made of?)

-A. R. Crowell

[rustytrout]

La Croce (an elegy)

for Mark and Michelle

I walk toward the neon cross

giant, looming over vineyards,

hammered into Etruscan ruins

atop a green hill.

 I glide over spotless Chianti pavement;

“Are my feet touching the ground?”

My nose fills with jasmine and

psithurism whispers the gospel of Mark;

amber streetlights meet black pavement like bubbling tar;

(I've picked so many poppies this week.)

Now passing through the shadows made of woven trees

I think,

“I like the way the darkness feels my face;

(if I sink back far enough

I feel I could disappear).”

-A. R. Crowell

[rustytrout]

Naked Birch

for Lady Ise

 At the doors of a cathedral

(hair blowing in strips

across cold peach cheeks,

snow caught in eyelashes)

I stood like a naked birch tree

hung bare by the ice and darkness.

 When a birch tree loses its chartreuse leaves

to the winter, leaving only the skeleton,

does the tree know

that spring is sure to come?

 Or does the tree weep in fear

believing that the Sun has abandoned it?

-A. R. Crowell