Category: Poetry

(After Dorriane Laux’s “The Shipfitter’s Wife”)
 
At dusk, after you have plowed
the vast field—grains of green
scattered beyond my vision, I will
embraceyou,clingtoyou.
Be drowned again in the incense
of your sweat, taste it like
I have never met salt in my cooking before.

Tonight—
I’ll play another wife, after the soil
which everyday you avow
to marry and toil.
Tonight,
I’ll be waiting, languid on this bamboo bed,
to be plowed—
and become whole again.

(For B.)

I’ve always watched in awe
the perfect flourish of your hands
and the outline of your stance
as you gracefully pushed your stick
with your firm grip
and slid the number-9 ball
into the waiting hole.

I always imagined
I was the most attractive pocket,
Yet it doesn’t seem so.
For every time you strike
the balls with your stick
you always fail
to sink it
into me.

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