Hello poet friends,
Thank you so much for your helpful generous comments on my March poem... on ALL my poems. I'm very grateful for this group - so glad to be with you and your work, your minds and hearts (I'm never sure if people go back to the comments from previous months - I sometimes remember to and sometimes not - so I wanted to make sure you all saw this! I'm still getting the hang of Blogger...).
Happy spring - very much looking forward to reading your April poems.
Kasey
At Cape Henlopen
All night wind insists in the
trees, its unsteady hush
funneling us down into sleep
under the tender
shelter the oaks, even
leafless, make—all night
their trunks creak and sigh
and speak. Speak
to me—I
think the word protect until its
edges
dissolve, inside the tent
that wraps us
like another, thinner skin,
rocked and chastened
by the wind that doesn’t
cease: it ripped
the nylon from our hands as
we tried
to pin the edges down, make
the tent stakes hold
to dead leaves and damp and
sand, the tangled
ground that presses back
against our bones.
The ocean hidden but near:
all night I mistake
wind for waves, waves for
breath, imagine the blur
at the horizon where it
practices dividing sea
from sky, one blue utterance
from the next. I want
never to mistake you, though
I do it all the time,
though we wake and drink the
tea before
it turns cold. Later you
crush juniper berries and hold
your fingers to my face: gin,
that muscled scent
sun and forgetting keep
falling through. Later we walk
the town churchyard and read:
Sacred to
the Memory Of.
Fell Asleep. We walk in light
so steep I can see each
single stitch
of your gray sweater, its hem
and sleeve; see
for a moment how we’re
knitted together
in the wind that keeps
tearing us gently from our names.
