6 / 21 / 2014 Poem of the Day: Summer Solstice BY STACIE CASSARINO I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, its you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldnt say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, vipers bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late. Stacie Cassarino, Summer Solstice from Zero at the Bone. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press. Source: Zero at the Bone (New Issues Press, 2009) STACIE CASSARINO
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 17:04:51 +0000
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