At first I feel like playdough
After it starts crumbling the
Blue color a kind of aftertaste
Of crest, but where are the blueberries
Then I feel like yew fronds
Caught in wind billowing gold
Pollen only I thought it was smoke from
A fire, is there a difference between
What starts life and what takes it?
This is a serious question, not a
poem. Like sitting next to someone
at a meeting who is not well, their breaths
do not syncopate to a rhythm, their body
rocks slowly like a music student’s
scrawls on the 5-line clever but
who doesn’t know
how to count. I never notice
how we rise and fall all
in a room until that day, by feeling the
antimetronomic asyncopy of
this person who must have been close
to death. If he had fallen down dead
would I remember it well? There was a woman
off kilter at a poetry workshop once
my friend and I start to fight about whether
a song needs rhythm. I resist.
who died the next day. We sucked air close by each
but she was way too much for me, she was like
a fuse: the verve of life demands things
it’s not just a pretty sparkler
i say, absolutely not. It’s as if he’s saying the
whole way I learned to sway with sisters
doesn’t count.
But maybe we can never
escape how our hearts beat
perhaps the fuse of life is what was burning into pollen
off the yew tree, and that’s what would heal the broken scraggle
rumpledump of blue playdough dried out. Next time it blossoms I’m going outside with glass vials. I am ready to be more, to be blessed, to remember how I’m whole
without being near something dying to remind me by counterpoint, a kind of syncopating of the heart that tolls and bumps
just for me I say just for me I feel just for us.
