JAQUELINE POWERS

Just the Blues

 

These days we seem to breathe together,
slow slumbering, but with a lucid
line of light, or sometimes molten, gray
but not smothering, no. It isn’t always winter
though we feel ice tighten, crack our fingers,
our bones. It was your room, your odor
of yeast and displaced days,
decades of art magazines, shelved tomes,
your stacks of old LPs, still mostly blues.
It caught me by surprise, snarled
in my own inertia, no words yet to give life
to unearthed thoughts, this silence
so unsettling as to be a death of sorts,
or is that too strong a word for a simple
settling into, a getting used to, a giving in to.
But you now with an awkward industry,
your unfamiliar hammer, nails, your
paint-splattered jeans. Movements quick,
loose-sure––as if remembered.
But each exhalation taken alone, and me
wanting to taste your sweat but left
flailing in another dream. Sometimes
a room becomes more than just a room.

 

 

Not Quite Spring

 

What one does,
or not.
Should no longer holds meaning,
except
in someone else’s context.
This new country,
sand-colored snow, bedraggled deer
borders not clearly marked.
Nonetheless
a belief in crocuses.
Maybe:
uncertain terrain,
a second thought.
Soon ice melts around each
rusted lock. But how
we are caught––this undulating wave.

 

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