On Being Legless is a snowflake poem, a relationship poem, a love poem, a poem about fragility and longing.
On Being Legless – Snowflake Poem
Once in awhile, you attached them,
The legs you cut off summers ago. I
Don’t like remembering me with legs, the boots
Cladding yours now don’t hide the glare.
They blare the hanging on replay,
The crowd’s murmurs volumizing
The outline of the flesh-clad bones once
Strong like the thighs of a racehorse and
Now, I smell manure dissing your burning
Incense. Yes, the temple doors shall remain
Closed, no matter how long the dog keeps
Howling for more bones now, he’s chewed
My drumsticks. But you’re a hopeless revisionist.
I see that as I watch you walk your legs as if
It was spring, as if four foot of snow outside
Wouldn’t swallow what I gulped summers ago.
Do you not smell the violets and the sweet peas?
On my tongue the taste of gardenias and freesias
I see us racing the length of the field behind
The forest with all the squirrels and nuts,
All-day long. But those days’ light speed
Now weighs nothing to no one. On sustainability:
My mother told me some flowers blossom brightest
And wilt quickest and so did our legs,
Our feet unfit for rooting. Still,
You keep them at the back of your wardrobe
Buried but resurrectable. To you, hope is a thing
With wings spanning everywhere and everyone
Even us. That woman who made the headlines
Because she was dead for six hours
That’s you as you are now strutting and spreading
A haze of lavender and rose. They say smells bypass
Reason like when a man and woman embrace
And fall into the breadth of joint breaths. But all I see is
Snowflakes drifting, no legs there either only
Stillness and the gentlest dropping home, ground-
Bound, bound to bed and wed down on the skin of the
Earth whose longing is the length of where the sky
Meets the ocean. And all I can see is your legs
Prancing like a doe which makes me think of Christmas
Oxen, not turkey or ham and how he said it was,
It is, all about love. In the street lights, snowflakes are
Stars, meteor showers who’ll melt and still, still
They bunch into a blanket as I hear the crunch when
My boots trace what is, what has been, all the while
Shooting grains of salt and dreams up into the sky.
Somewhere between the surface and above and below,
snowflakes settle.