My poem The Geography of Desire is now up at “Kissing Dynamite”, a stunning new online journal with zest and vision! My deep thanks to editor Christine Taylor for giving this particular poem a perfect home. We are a baker’s dozen and each issue features one poet with commentary – insightful and interesting (Andre Lepine for this issue) – so please enjoy. And for any poet friends out there, do consider submitting to this fine journal! Monthly themes arise from the submissions and the turn around time is very quick. And don’t you just love the name of the journal?
Tag: desire
Face to Face
Mist trails the moon’s departure,
tracing an absence through
the precisely ordered landscape
to the brim of the water, edging
toward the face in the river,
circles it and slips away.
Like the moon, and by its light,
my face is a silver coin tossed
into a dark well and wished on,
its frame of long hair
a rippling shadow of leaves
pointing the way to a peace
I can only imagine,
the eyes seeing beyond
the ghostly grandmother
willows and elms,
beyond the standing flesh of me,
the mouth – the missing line
of a poem. I want to kiss it.
I am no Narcissus, but I cannot stop
looking at my shimmering other.
This liquid face has no age that matters,
no sex that specifically appeals.
It is a painter’s first brushstroke,
bold and horizonless.
I bend close and closer,
almost falling in.
More than my known face
I want that one –
a moon sailing
through rivering stars
on a bright path
home.
This poem was first published by the Pedestal Magazine and was
later included in my chapbook “Stealing Eternity”.
Like Mona Lisa
How beautiful…….she sleeps,
gathering the early light
inward
like a sail filling with wind,
her face composing
its first smile
of the day:
little boat loaded
with last night’s dreams.
Like Mona Lisa,
whose fathomless eyes are a wake
from the little boat sailing
back and forth
from secret to secret
right in front of us, turning us
into a crowd of craning necks,
so much wanting
aboard.
Looking at a loved one sleeping was the impetus for this poem. It won second place in a contest by Pandora’s Collective and was published in 2012.
Sometimes, A Heron
stands like a bearded yogi
in the willow-edged stream
that runs under the main road
an easy block from the sea,
waiting for his own kind
of traffic.
At that intersection
of necessity and desire,
it is no accident when
the still life breaks from
its green-daubed canvas
with the long, scissored plunge
of his beak, and swallows whole
and writhing, the little fish
that almost made it.
Sometimes, in the rivering
silence between two hearts,
I am stalked by
an elegant longing
and taken suddenly
by its gleaming need
to live.
And hope I do not
reach too slowly
into the sea-deep amber
light of its promise,
like these bare and slender
branches that have crept from
their tangled weep of shadows,
blossoms pending.
This first appeared in North Shore Magazine and is included in my chapbook “Stealing Eternity”.
Lynne Burnett 