Two Poems

Lori Ellison




Indian Summer

In this harsh field of straw
I kneel thrumming my lips with a wind-up angel

I am the one facing this
worldly color glowing like murmuring
embers
that hold the grey in abeyance

I feel the trees dying inward
retracting their leaves like fingers; I see
interrupted hands grow.

The scarecrow has eaten the rinds
of the vespers and found them so,
so bitter
some tumors grow teeth
and hair in this same
internal reckoning.

Take your forlorn
temperature in this extinguished
fever dream: the scarecrow has
no head, no mouth, no teeth
and yet
utterances of rural divination
comes from the lips he does
not have - eyes
flashing corn yellow sparks as
a Harvest Moon

Grins along
the desolate horizon

 

In the Mouth of the Evening

Entranced by such a love-match
of Craft and Utterance: the
artisanship of a liquid sensuality

Ah, that so swift a murmuring
could create a pulley so
wild within itself; an immense
fluttering above
of fingers like sea anenomes

Falling in love is a kind of sky
dive: the plummeting, the parachute,
the descent; with its impossible uplift:
levity defying the gravity and the
thrill as it
greets the body entire

I feel your lap burn and your
kisses travel
what a milky light
to see you naked, shoeless
and radiant.

I live filled with the substance
of your honey
your tongue down my throat
& wrapt twice round my heart

What is this silent keening
melancholy at the center?
I live, I live - conquered,
no doubt, by the Vespers.

 

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