feminine, winter, cold

When the blue shadows
pull themselves across the hills
and white sinks into twilight—

the blue snow of twilight—

there is an illusion of beginning:

here, where the field intersects the sky
beyond the fence;

where the crystals slowly scurry
from the firs.

It is a foreign house.
There is nothing to unpack.

It is not yet night
and the day, with its covered mouth
that refused to talk—

that day is gone:
it is a blessing.

Let it be a blessing.

Let the fir branches softly shake their snow:
soft as plumes, soft as ostrich feathers.

from Whore: "feminine, winter, cold" first appeared in The Tampa Review 

Bourbon

Fireflies, the dark heat,
a deep humidity begins evaporating

and night is dented with this small array of stars
from a motel—Stardust or Star-Lite,

I can’t remember now.
The bones of your body—dear cage

for keeping you.
The way they make your body old

beneath your muscles. Almost ghost
limbs. Trunk of a small car, clicked open, metal

in that slow plie. Our fingers grip
the handles of our luggage, pull it from the dark.

Your hands. Your mother,
a whole family

crowds into the room with us.
It’s summer. We unpack.

The contents of our suitcases
are mingling . . . this seems right. 

from The White Bride 

The Night Cloth

There is always the path back to the place you began, 
but this time, take another.  You have been given the
colors of a Vermeer, made in muted light.  They are
what twilight does to wheat and shadow.  And then
the man below you, in his apartment, does a kind
of singing—as though he is making song with his
fingers as they drum a tabletop.  As soon as you
name this color gold, it looks like ultramarine or
even distant knapweed or even a part of the ocean.
The dripping rain on the rooftop is now as random
as the click of the second hand heard between the
shhh-shhh of passing cars.  But really, anyway,
there’s no where were we.  The cars interrupt the
darkness with their splashes of sudden, repeated
white.  There’s a kind of rhythmic humming now
from below, as though the voice, or several voices,
run, again and  again, into a wall, insistent, and the
walls themselves are ticking—or is it the heater, or
is it the rain.  Something apparently wants to chant—
will use anything to chant.  And you—where do you
think you’re going.

"The Night Cloth" first appeared in Ninth Letter and
was later featured on The Poetry Superhighway.

© 2009 Sarah Maclay