Here's to kissing and the Full Moon in Aquarius

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Ellen Bass

He Stood

He stamped his feet and opened the door, stood on the threshold, turned around. The desert light shrank his eyes, sun slammed his face--he almost lost his breath--blond shiny grasses, ring of distant mountains pinking in the haze, the scorched but somehow fertile earth--he wiped his brow--he couldn't go in, he couldn't move, he couldn't say why--as if he too were a thing dried in sunlight, stopped in his tracks in the heat that fixed him in its gaze--rattlesnake Medusa--where he breathed the stinging dusty winds as though a rock inhaling rock--his proper evolution?--and fed on silence as it flowered and fell--the fierce clarity, the fierce restraint--front door behind him hanging open like a thrown shadow as he blazed in place... a man inside the view... the zooming arc... and edge to edge the blue absolute...

 About This Poem

"When I visit my friends south of Tucson, I say I'm going to Arizona to eat sky. I'm always amazed how much amplitude there is in the desert's minimal details. I wanted the person in this poem to be so transfixed by the view that he shifts from being a detached observer to being a part of that amplitude, a figure moving from the outside to the inside of his own frame." 

--Aaron Shurin

Magnolia, the Lotus of Trees

Observing leaves: at first, I doubt they are persimmon—
looking at the blossoms, I doubt they are lotus.
How fortunate there are no fixed forms—
this tree has no comparison.

Hyesim

Translated by Ian Haight & T’ae-yong Ho

Merry Summer Solstice 2013! Here is to the flaming hot star above us and the Super Moon!

Doing Laundry on Sunday

So this is the Sabbath, the stillness
in the garden, magnolia
bells drying damp petticoats

over the porch rail, while bicycle
wheels thrum and the full-breasted tulips
open their pink blouses

for the hands that pressed them first
as bulbs into the earth.
Bread, too, cools on the sill,

and finches scatter bees
by the Shell Station where a boy
in blue denim watches oil

spread in phosphorescent scarves
over the cement. He dips
his brush into a bucket and begins

to scrub, making slow circles
and stopping to splash water on the children
who, hours before it opens,

juggle bean bags outside Gantsy’s
Ice Cream Parlor,
while they wait for color to drench their tongues,

as I wait for water to bloom
behind me—white foam, as of magnolias,
as of green and yellow

birds bathing in leaves—wait,
as always, for the day, like bread, to rise
and, with movement

imperceptible, accomplish everything.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

***

Early Cascade

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return

it would have rotted on the vine.

So I cut the first tomato into eighths,

salted the pieces in the dusk

and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's)

or bitter,

even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem

that made my throat feel dusty and warm.

Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.

The miser accused by her red sums.

Better had I eaten the dirt itself

on this the first night in my life

when I have not been too busy for my loneliness—

at last, it comes.

Lucia Perillo

 ***

Evening Primrose

Oenothera biennis

Early adopter, familiar of vespertine
temporal specialists, itinerants:
who said your life would be easy? Chance
encounters, chancy neighborhoods, the lean

ground nothing cultivated will possess. But you,
night-bloomer, all strings of dubious exes, loose
ends, unabashedly seedy—you need no excuse.
This is simply what you do.

Daze them with perfume, bombshell;
daylight’s gaudy attractants are nothing to you.
Instead, take moonlight to the next level; take the dunes,
parking strips, waste ground that, for the right body—well,

presents the perfect opportunity. Herb of the X
chromosome: you know stigma. You don’t care.
Wherever the ground’s disturbed, you’re there,
brash, sticky with longing, a complex

quadruply branching ripple-effect array
of balanced-lethal genes and a flair for risk.
You know why you are here, let no one say
otherwise, heterotic odalisque;

X marks the spot, and hot things happen next;
slippery, brimming inner places; oils surefire
for increasing suppleness and desire
and damn the consequences, baby;

they’re on your turf now.

Amy Glynn

 

About this poem:

"The collection from which this poem is excerpted is a riff on ancient botanical and pharmacological volumes (Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen, etc). I've always been fascinated by the echoes between the properties of herbs and trees and flowers and various human drives and patterns and experiences. Evening primrose is a weed with some unique reproductive tactics, which I found interesting because it has a long and well-vetted reputation for improving female fertility. Its unusually-shaped stigma even looks like a big X, as if the plant is advertising its usefulness for female (x-chromosome) complaints. Coincidence? Paracelsus would probably have said there's no such thing."

—Amy Greacen - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23597#sthash.wdNAqzWd.dpuf

About this poem:

"The collection from which this poem is excerpted is a riff on ancient botanical and pharmacological volumes (Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen, etc). I've always been fascinated by the echoes between the properties of herbs and trees and flowers and various human drives and patterns and experiences. Evening primrose is a weed with some unique reproductive tactics, which I found interesting because it has a long and well-vetted reputation for improving female fertility. Its unusually-shaped stigma even looks like a big X, as if the plant is advertising its usefulness for female (x-chromosome) complaints. Coincidence? Paracelsus would probably have said there's no such thing."

—Amy Greacen - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23597#sthash.wdNAqzWd.dpuf