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.
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