Bella Sera
The nights have spoken...
and every evening the stars grow a little smaller from the shore,
basil, tomatoes, ripe fruit, like the bella sera of sleep.
We devoured the bread and watched the small boats locked to the lonely harbor.
Someone was calling your name, Adore, Adore, but I can't remember...
What sad music did Chopin praise—
like wind that slipped through my hands, sweet water.
We watched them slowly drift from the shore.
The pines shimmered with rain, wet sun,
as they pulled the seasonal nets across the summer.
The stranger walked right past us.
They laughed, casting the net, absorbed in their daily labor.
I was tired, unpinning my hair like a dress.
No one was present. There was light, yes, and the quiet chatter of birds.
Someone was calling your name, sonorous, painfully—as if
the heart could bear no more.
Poverty
What you wanted to say is by now the hyperbole of light
on a day when the rain is trained to pull its weight
across the moon's surrender,
a ripple of wind that welcomes the dark.
What you wanted to say is mercy
shattered, old wisdom on a day of perpetual waiting...
I miss you the way the wind misses the leaves of autumn.
I miss you the way the birds search the barren stumps.
I miss you like water, like intense thirst,
the light is a tone and chord and patches of snow, melting.
This morning I watched a homeless woman beg for change from a public phone,
her finger digging deeply for the sound of coins.
Is it not like Heaven's absence? this desperate thirst....
Ekleksographia:
Wave Three
May, 2010
Poetry
Jacqueline Marcus
Jacqueline Marcus' poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Ohio Review, The Antioch Review, The Journal, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry International, Hotel Amerika, The Delta Review, The American Poetry Journal and more. Her book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of www.ForPoetry.com. (Dedicated to protecting nature.) She is currently promoting green technologies (solar & wind) on the island of Maui. See www.GoSolarMaui.com. Her new collection of poems, Summer Rains, is under consideration for publication at Michigan State University Press.