Three Poems
J. Bailey Hutchinson
What the water keeps. / What motes on the mantle. / Watching our breath winnow / down time’s hall, foaming some / far-off doorway. Pen-bright, glittering cream. / Every-belly. Jawful of chlorine. / We’d sluice over hot brick, gasping grass. / Cover ourselves in lucents & gels. / Do you want to go back? I want / to go back. / To ear-aches, bubble font. / To an omelet so large. / To the crayon’s wax-click, to / grape. Which was never / grape. / Hallowed hour of the afternoon, the taste of TV-air. / Everything translucent, purple-tinted. / Lunchtime plasmic & wet, body / by milk. A small secret’s / dire weight. / Fruitstripe foursquare. Jumprope pinkingshear. / Rink-varnish, carousel, sharkleberry fin. / All our dolls’ feet / chewed flat, knees burnt / on the rug’s bald edge. / The moon was just the moon and not / a god pulling at our ears, / saying look how rotten, tomorrow’s ruthless arrival. / Morning’s powerful lilac. / Small. We were / small. Minnow-chattering, tan. / Tracing opal cartwheels of oil / in the lot, the tar’s puddled clog. It is our turn to wonder—how did we get here, / when did we / get so tall.
pinpoint unfurling / light gone frabjous / starwise night-scene widening each lungful / a cold that brightens, chapeling open / our chests / streaming down the street-stones / syrup, faelike / subtle chitter of crystal / alabaster / lichen / luster of breath that lasts and lasts / goldwhite apse brimming with hallow / each footstep ice-edged, impossibly prismed / your stark human edge / blurred by stars / godsbright, the forever of tomorrow, tomorrow’s tomorrow / accruing on the dayshore / past the river, the spruce, the mountain aching upwards / into a dusk that expands like saxifrage / spuming margin / we can’t see, something more apophatic than after / but still there, thinly figured like moon-succumbed sun / O noctilucence, O nightshining / when winter finds her footholds there comes a hush so swallowing we might / vanish in it / but O, the atmosphere’s bending particulate / watercoloring the sky / you must only look up, and unfasten yourself from gloom / face a fallow so vast your vision blurs / green birthing green again and again and again
When Sora Said “My Friends Are My Power,” I Really Felt That
for my friends
one night, your wrist jeweled fall-risk, we handle each scan like a deed: look,
a home, here in the wild walnut of your brain
*
whose bellows as mine as yours? whose gutturations as dear? in my youngest howlings
you cleave the night near me—long, pale, truckshine decorating your eyes
*
it’s a long year we spend drinking, you for love and me, also, for love
though you let me pretend otherwise, my heart in the mother-cool of your hand
*
I cry on you; I cry on you; mule-shy me, always bucking touch, but the night he dies I learn
how right, my nose in your neck
*
your voice finds me at my most alone; you do not let me say I don’t deserve;
the moon is a new genus in your genius
*
we are opposite-shaped: you winter I warm, you caution I cant, you quiet-eye
I rattle the scaffold, but we are the same hungry, we come from the water
*
the night I ruin the taxi you endure the driver, fetch my denim, keep my secret;
the morning after you speak so soft over sausages, tea
*
I could kiss you so I do, and even after, years after,
yours is a laugh I crave—O dawnbird plump with honey
*
bless the luck of eggs and you, our bad boyfriends; bless
your smooth keel through the froth of the turning and frenzied lake
*
I have never known a warmer kitchen: carrot, curry,
your soups and the wizards we wished we were
*
boldfriend, you teach me to seek the richest cuts, the darkest greens. you
tell every seed & root to eat what it needs, your garden is the brightest I’ve ever seen
*
arc of laughter, amethystine; colorworld confronting night’s dogged ingress;
you, whose heart does not begin every day open but opens, still