Poetry

The floor no longer gleams as once it did.

Unmended hang our gowns, unkempt our hair.

A sound like sighs, or silence, stirs the air.

No ashen beauty trembles to be chid.

We loved her--only her, and in our way.

So we were harsh and made her sleep in soot--

but she reminded us what we were not--

gave Love a voice to cry out for the day.

Each stitch drove needles of remorse to heart;

each broom-sweep choked us with the dust of pride;

each clean dish shone with coldness from our eyes.

But these are harmless now, without her art;

and, safe from Love, our harshness yields to sighs.

Image: Untitled illustration for "Cendrillon" by Gustav Doré. Public Domain.

It murmurs of how it misses him,

that amniotic burbling motor I never minded before.

I lie beached on the new half of the bed

and stare back at the small, gape-mouthed crowd--

shark that is no shark, devil of an angelfish,

algae-eater swallowed up in green.

The tubes always sounded like noisy IVs.

Now it's as though they've been torn loose--

bloody sound spills forth and fills my ears.

I drift like kelp, tendriling into dayless deeps

of wishing, toward some unsounded sargasso

of sleep

Image: 1_Pomacanthus_navarchus_Blue-gridled_angelfish.jpg The original uploader was Ssalmenkivi at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons