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Susan
Culver
Shaped
By This Need
I.
I am trying to tell you how it is for us,
in a way that makes your soul sing
even as the mind fights it, I am speaking
of your soul as if it was a universe, a city,
the particular way you arrange your hands
and perhaps it is in them - your hands -
that the answer rests.
When you asked me last night why
it was I would send with my poems
a short note: should you wish to read them,
it was your hands I was thinking of,
how different they are, how large
and bound to the process of shaping.
There is creation in your hands and mine
so very small, are wind spent birds, fluttering
this way or that, stroking the beautiful but never quite
owning the beauty, drowning in a kitchen sink, in a froth
of snow when the morning is too cold for flying.
II.
If you could, for once, hold the soap of my soul,
touch its transient warmth, could smell the scent of me,
it still would not be me but merely an echo of I,
a thin drift, a feathering left behind for the moment,
a gift, should you wish to claim it.
And once claimed, I can only imagine the ways
you would shape me beneath your weight, carving a place
to bury your face, to bury your secrets,
a place to bury the bruise of us. If you remember anything,
remember this: you can neither live in a gift or a drift,
a moment is but a path to something for once
far greater than you or I alone could ever know.
III.
Even from your city, you have known
the rise and fall of my laughter, my fear;
the landscape of breath that carries me
from season to season. You know
these from dreams, from my news reports,
delivered to your door with unabashed regularity
as I am shaped by this need to have you know
me, to be that gutter fed trickle, signs of a neighbor
who hand washes the sidewalk even in winter
so that, if water ever begins to flow uphill, you will come,
will find this place of me, and will find it beautiful.
IV.
Whatever happens to us will happen
on separate sheets, chapters, like snowflakes
on far flung blood fields, their only common
characteristic being that which defines them: war
with ourselves, our skins, our own limitations.
What time is granted is granted unrequited, love,
presses itself into a downtown bus,
into the forgotten spaces, you at one end
and I at another, affording only so many
glances at each other, for to look too often or too hard
would be to regret our very lives, how they are sewn
to this patchwork distantly, carelessly, our colors defined
by those who were born to find us more
than those we were born searching for.
12
December 2004, round II, poem 10
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| Susan
Culver lives in Colorado and
is the editor of Lily.
Her work has been
published in a number of online journals, including The Pedestal,
Paumanok Review, Wicked Alice, Tryst,
and others.
email: Susan Culver
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