VINYL POETRY

Volume 10, July 2014

BIRDIE
Eve JonesView Contributor’s Note

Aftermath

It is nothing. It is everything.
The heart leaking in its socket.
The garden incandescent, bent
By feet of light. This air in which your hand
Lingers toward me. Thirty miles
Away a choir’s voice slides over
The rafters and this, my hip
On the bed, pivoting the world on its wing,
Your fingers in a white font of linen.
God out there, wandering his deserts,
Jealous in the walls of his nuclei. Killing a man.
Love, when you leave me you take a hundred
June acres I walk like a plank and all life
I pass through in your name: the cream rose clung
To the wall, the dog’s bark on the bell curve
Of a rain drop, the dusky silk inside
A suitcase inside a dream. Even as you touch me
I am dreaming of old wars, the deep evening solitude of men
Among men, to fall
On the sword for a lock of a hair.
Do you understand? I am not falling
But filling the space our bodies make with apples.
Time is a soft shoulder, I know. It dies the way a star dies:
Imperceptible, a bright black absence.
Let us lie down under its end.
I call you and my voice rests in a field, my open palm. Listen
To the rose leaf brittle, the dog faintly barking. Listen as the gods
Walk back into my body.