Category: Night

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Captain Depth Perception

I see you like space
between my car and the raised
bumper of an F150 sitting
wider than yellow parking lines.
I know when to brake and back
up, when to cut the wheel
so I turn just far enough
into your space, filling it
with so much of myself that
almost I fill it all, almost
I feel the crunch of fender and truck.
My power saves
paint jobs at a price.
Every hero has her heal.
Mine’s the depth I can’t stop
sensing, a constant knowledge
of our world packed tight,
nearing collision, and the fear
of someone cutting too sharp,
closing the space completely.
At night I know twin lights
of speeding cars enough
to pull out and see we’re safe
in our sufficient depth of space.

—Marcus Goodyear, from Barbies at Communion, T. S. Poetry Press

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Seal Lullaby

Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
    And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us
    At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
    Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark
    overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.

—Rudyard Kipling, see more in Kipling: Poems

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Whispered

I should tell you
about my hands, small
and experienced.

The other night,
when my youngest daughter
said, as I tucked her into bed,

Tell me something. Tell me anything,
I turned off the light and whispered this:

when I cut the beets tonight,
the red water went all into
the lines on my hands—

so many lines.

—L.L. Barkat, from Love, Etc., T. S. Poetry Press

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Lifted

What’s that?
I say, and turn to see you watching me.

Go back, you whisper, coming close,
lifting my hem a little higher.

Okay…

They were young.
She was French and Indian (through Canada),
but they say she looked like Cleopatra.

It was night,
and she and he drove closer to the stars,
somewhere in the Helderbergs

(there is a castle in those hills, I hear,
built by a philosopher, potter, poet).

The sky, I think, was black and red,
too much, as it were, and then
he raised her hem—

for the universe knew, it knew:
you would have need of me.

—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press

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Lambent

You see, it is more complicated
than that. I said it was the untutored search
for lambent, astral, welter, and the river of stars.

But my mother would not know
the meaning of lambent, welter, astral—
though the river of stars

is a place she walked me, pointing
on the darkest nights, when I suppose
she wanted to escape her memories

and show me something of the world,
the kind of something only she
could show me.

What did she know of astral predictions,
when she simply walked the nights to forget
the welts of time

and the long-gone days her father’s boots
met her mother’s face in the lambent
living room, where kerosene lamps

could not light her hiding place
beneath the sideboard (why was the sideboard
in the living room?)

You see the complication now.
And how a passel of big talk
tells her this: what do you know

of the world? You never even learned
to chop an onion, through its many
moistened skins. You couldn’t keep

my father, Ivy man of words…
when all you knew was the river,
and the stars.

—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press

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Matriarch

Children off to bed, chatter secrets.
I descend red oak stairs, reach for downy coat,
walk out beneath the moon.

Sled in hand, I pick my way to secret place,
settle plastic red, breathe deep to unwind tight-sprung
day, lie down and look towards the pine.

Branched arms are softness, feathered cradle
calling. Trunk is hips, come to say, sit;
gone is the needle-sharp talk of day.

Nearby, grandmother-curved bush looks
to lap in silence, remembers how it was with young ones,
remembers how grace used to drift in with the night.

—L.L. Barkat, from God in the Yard