Enough
—for A
You couldn’t come sooner, I know.
I couldn’t either—rough traffic,
chance and history. That we’ve arrived
in this one room’s particulate-spiced
air, bright rain of time’s tiny droplets
wetting our faces, it’s enough
to stir a prayer to whatever
god, maybe just out into all this
space, how we’ve fallen here, made it
so far without getting crushed
despite the rolling stampedes, not yet
riddled and bled with all the guns
on the street, present and breathing,
up to our waists in the gasoline-sweet
flood of our screen-fed wants,
somehow still able to notice
each other’s whispers under the howl
of the piped-in mistrust, still fool enough
to lose our tickets to the big fight
and settle for these tender arms, here,
tonight. Quiet amazement of touch,
fresh gusts of our chests pouring
as if off the river we’d forgotten
runs through the old city under our skin,
these robes of sensation we’re dressed in
ruffled with wonder that we have met
before we’re taken apart—it’s enough,
and will be enough, if not in our hearts
once they’re torn to dirt, for that god
who’ll trip on the shreds of our kiss.
Picture Me Beaming
A lit string runs through us.
Sometimes, brighter than day.
Oh, it’s aberrant to see it—
a neural fault. Tumor, seizure,
migraine aura….
So thin yet
stronger than want or titanium.
Scintillates at frequencies we call
noise in the system. So what
if you don’t believe it. Doesn’t mean
it isn’t. It isn’t
what you believe. Listen, the string
sings when our distances pull it
taut. When one of us dying
plucks it. Look. The late sun’s
rays streaming through the trees
catch a spider’s web and set it
agleam…you hadn’t seen a thing.
You twitch this fiber that outlives
all of us when you think I wish
I could hold her again,
or wonder
How is he now? Write me a letter
Love. Don’t lift a finger. Picture me
beaming. Exquisite, that thread’s
tug, just then, through the ribs.
Jed Myers lives in Seattle. He is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, forthcoming), and two chapbooks. 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, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Natural Bridge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Solstice, Canary, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.
