Podcast: “She Said”

Copyright, Thomas Bair, 2009

Click below for the text of “She Said”

she said

The first night my eyes walked the corners of her jaw line, we talked

of fruit baskets and the tragedy of them and nothing between. Her eyes,

slivers of a street light behind fog, I imagined they filtered her world grey;

how she hung her head, and so easily, relaxed the knots of our stares.

It made the quiet between us pleasant as dried flowers. She wore

dirty brown pants over pale, distant hips, pants that housed

the soft of her thighs like an orphanage. I asked her to stand under a

stuttering light, and she did, and the shadows played tag with her

cheekbones while she glowed under her broken halo. In that moment,

she was testimony, and I found the wall, and I could only slouch.

And she smiled and I tried too.

And I was lost and she knew.

In the wake of prelude, we looked to the planes of a mattress for anything

tangible. With our scars, we passed through each other like wind chimes.

Our mouths touched as if they could break, as if they were already

broken. My eyes, green, muddied, grass, went to memorize the horizon

of her iris where earth prepared to fall in on itself. We wandered

through all the nights of each other, fighting morning like a fever.

She pulled me towards the circle of her chest, where nothing traveled,

where I stayed until the sun pointed its finger. This give, take, and bend,

this fluid barter between breath and before, this break, these closed eyes

this scab on scab on scab to lips, this, this, she said, is beautiful.

And I smiled and she tried too.

And she was lost and I knew.

And day crawled over the canvas of rooftops like a runaway, and where

we had planned to enter only the blue of a mind, a stone city of another’s:

You,

the morning called:

yes,

even again,

yes

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under These Be the Verses: English Department Poets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.