“Peace at just a little distance — wouldn’t that be nice?”
It’s still National Poetry Month, and BROAD STREET presents this broadside featuring a poem from our Winter/Spring 2019 issue, “Rivals & Players.” Drag the broadside to your desktop to blow up, print, and otherwise enjoy; or simply scroll down to read in plain text.
Between Two Darknesses
–
I might’ve stayed. And had I
needed less, more satisfied
to spade and spread the irises,
–
to read beside her nights
till she decided time
the lights went out, to wait
–
while want itself was held up
under deep review, who knows,
I might’ve read through Byron,
–
gone on to speckled orchids
on the kitchen sill, evolved
my pickling skills to fennel bulbs,
–
my Deep River Blues to quick
as old blind Watson’s with all
the evenings free to kill picking….
–
She’d watch a British series
in another room. She’d knit,
might listen yet again to Brubeck.
–
Surf her laptop for that French
cable stitch she’d coveted
since the Fremont shop. What is it,
–
need? She needed not
to have it. I bristled, twitched,
unable to dismiss it. How
–
I wished to be more civil,
to find, with age perhaps,
the switch and flick it. Peace
–
at just a little distance — wouldn’t
that be nice? Still I think
the recipes I’d try, the curry
–
laced with my own raised bed’s
capsicum and coriander.
At last the crimson roses
–
in a splash atop the gateway
trellis I’d handcrafted. We
in wrinkled ease and close enough.
–
Beside the hearth the shelves
I’ll never build, filled with books
she might yet read. She still collects
–
her simple scarves, small pearls,
more minimalist black sweaters….
She sips her smidge of dry
–
Bordeaux, lips to sherry glass.
She’s needed less and less,
triumphed in near-emptiness,
–
near-silence, in that house
where I became the fussy guest
she tolerated. What was it,
–
then, at last? How rude
my appetite? I’d press
myself against her in the night,
–
gestures I could not contain
that she could not invite. And who
ended us? I’m the one
–
who flew, left her to her
elegant nest, and lived
long enough to land where I was
–
needed, by need’s touch
blessed — hand that reaches
between two darknesses.
–
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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and three chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award). Recent honors include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Recent poems can be found in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Solstice, and elsewhere. Jed is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.
