More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
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Contact
Tom
Daley
Legacy
Tonight I walk
by the mirror
in my father's
green shirt
that I am
wearing for the first time.
For a minute
I think it is him in the mirror,
without the
girth or the knob of the belly button
hanging strangely
inside out,
but him all
the same. In that moment
something
has changed me
into a man
content to sleep off weekends
under the
rubber tree in the living room,
to watch football
and play endless games of chess with myself.
I will live
and die with a legacy of a handful of shirts
and a certain
quantity of affection
given without
condition or responsibility,
lavished equally
on dog ears, nurses, neap tides,
bittersweet
chocolate, paint flaking off bridges,
young women
in laundromats folding their clothes.
Ambitious
only for the small comfort
of late night
long distance phone calls to an old lover,
I can stand
up without my loose socks slipping to my ankles
and cross
a cold creek barefoot without screaming.
All this is
something to bless him for,
the man who
once filled out
this old green
shirt.
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Counter Tulips
The tulips,
singed with brown and folding out,
still pearl
with luminescence as if new
and drooping
down their edges curl toward
a hidden draft
that lifts them as it blows.
You put them
on the counter as we left
to walk through
snow and February slush.
We talked
of times stretched longer than regret,
of dusks when
want flew jumbled in a flood
of kites.
Remember that? White string for yards
that rolled
and tugged above our asphalt field
until the
kite tails twitched behind the clouds
and lost themselves
out in the darkened world.
In wind, the
tulips thin like love misspent.
They slip
to earth untethered by their light.
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