I wrote both of these poems last year, when I first moved out to Boston. I am hoping that they project the feeling of freshness that I still associate them with. I spent a lot of my free time reading poetry, a novelty that I can't always afford while in grad school. These never seem to be finished, scine I revise them each time I read them, but they still have a strand of that original thought that coaxed them out of the corner.
Then and now
Then and now buds on the limbs,
the way we spoke in other autumns,
before garments fell like leaves as if
we had suddenly started speaking
with our quotes off,
informal, narrating each other, perhaps
you’re the poem and I’m
the gesture, the sky drinking in the smoke
part of the day, so
that’s really all that happened
today, your absence was present as it often is,
spring only reminds me of winter,
every song is the same,
Then and now
Then and now.
You and you
You laid on a car hood with me - in the parking
lot between its lines and under
the ink sky - my hand held in yours
still held sometimes in my mind I
can see you glowing in your seven years ago skin,
taut, imperfect, this afternoon with me,
living buried in the word
you
beckoned
you back between lines, again the ink,
the sky, the stars which reach out
long after they shine.
:) read more
on Travis - Selfish Jean