J. ALLYN ROSSER
I. An Open Fire
from here to all the world
and back—but there are dusks
that fall without you
when the gaslight will not catch
and I can sense your eyes on others,
pick up the scent of smiles
they cast on you. I concentrate
on flame, make dinner glow.
Later, you tend the blue light
of the evening news
strobing our overheated den
and lean closer
as if quickened by disaster,
rapt in a fabulous safety:
leaking toxins, gagging streams
and all the unsafe elsewhere
you, by watching, make stay there—
like the first man on earth
watching darkness through an open fire
at the mouth of his cave.
What he cannot quite make out
won’t hurt us,
though it pass near enough
to fling fantastic shadow,
ripple through alerted blood
and lick the thinning, blackened air,
this flimsy air before us.
II. Kiss Me You Fool
Down on all fours, the morning after
your demon has scratched
the eyes out of mine,
I grope on the rug
for lost pieces of things,
some of them yours.
Your roses on the coffee table
level with me, sick
of craning their necks
over baby’s breath
and bad language. They stick
all their tongues out at once.
Clearly they can’t keep
putting up with this,
having gone to such crooked
lengths to be only beautiful, only
to die with flying colors.
You walk in, unshaven, just
as I find two petals, still
red, shaped like hearts.
Almost like hearts.
The height of passion’s a cinch
to reach. Then what? A breeze
too strong for ripened parts?
III. What Was Clear
After the old friends and the new friends
and all the other guests were gone,
we sat at the table for hours
pondering contour and color,
forcing parts to interlock
and then thinking
better of it, thinking
maybe the puzzle was not
one, but two in one box.
No picture there to clue us in.
Still, edges were quickly complete
with corners and the usual sky.
On one side, the red of a barn
you called schoolhouse,
on the other, my cypress—
your oak. We squinted and pressed, irritable
and hopeless by turns.
There was a lagoon at last,
with something there floating,
surely swans. But you laughed:
ducks. A white rowboat
after all, with a gap inside,
and something gray and something red
(two pieces we would never find).
A rag and a bucket, you said.
But it was a child with a pail.
IV. Separation: Summer Night
“So I unto my selfe alone shall sing,
The woods shall to me answere and my Eccho ring.”
— SPENSER, Epithalamion
Tonight the lamplight holds me derelict
at my desk, mocks me in yellow colors,
and sends a wire to every errant insect
within acres. I will screen such callers,
dismiss the Muses, brace each door that hinges
inward. There, love. I’ll visit upon our honor
no reflection, but commune with what cringes
and crawls: all the clambering damned with torn or
hardened antennae, who’ve come so far to press
their tiny souls against the screen, grasping
at my little light, poor mecca of redress
for poorest mortals. Look: flattened, gasping,
they bear their flagging wings intact, and fight
to keep that tiny sense of self upright.