Poem For a Tuesday Great Sleeps I Have Known Once in a cradle in Norway folded like Odins eight-legged horse Sleipnir as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla Once on a mountain in Taos after making love in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver After your brother walked into the Atlantic to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude Immediately following lunch against circadian rhythms, once in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses The last night in the Katmandu guest house where I saw a bird fly from a monks mouth a consolidated sleep of East and West Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick I woke up singing as in the apocryphal story of my birth at Temple University Hospital On the mesa with the burrowing owls on the mesa with the prairie dogs Willing to be lucky I ran the perimeter road in my sleep entrained to the cycles of light and dark Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams Once on the beach in New Jersey after the turtles deposited their eggs before my parents grew old, nocturnal ~ Robin Becker
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 09:44:22 +0000