The Coming and Going

                                  

 I

To the lean lime grass, bent in the light—I surrender.

and the rough-throated oak telling me white in the winter ---yes.

The swandip of your neck: arrogance or humiliation?---either.

My own stilted dreams, meat and milk---ether.

We will someday call across the deathroom

for a husband, a lover, and will be met

with tears and halting sighs, remembering

the back room between stacked boxes.
Summer thighs surrender.

II

The salty wash of tongues, our seashell fragrance.

(That was before death.) We grieve ahead—yes.

And that dank back room,

finally together ---fumbling cannibals,

murmured incantations: loadseed

and your midnight sobbing,  my blue

goodwill pills. God, and our letters, look,

written with such greedy care!

Ink and wine and paper. I can’t believe you’re gone, you’re---here.

Alicia Fisher

2012

Published in Ravenous Butterfly's online journal, January 2013