Open Space; Smoke
Open Space
You were told it was healing
to climb above the valley and glimpse
the sun’s beginning, to feel the grass
ignite and glare at you, and maybe
even see the crude inter-
ruptions amalgamate, tuck
themselves away into other clefts
of mountains. You had never
been so close before
to the atmosphere’s easy
love-worn quilt.
As the sun distanced itself
from the edge, a world below
unrolled. The quilt did not–
don’t you dare leave that soft
detainment. Sometimes as the light
gathers, you can hear the arguments
of beetles, clicking about when pseudoclouds
of freezing jet fuel will take on
real clouds’ repose; where the tarnished
pennylike stacks from factory chimneys
will spill; how the place
we stand is wanted and seen
as vital earth, some productive
discharge in the name of
convenience.
All this candor is hard
to walk back down from. You linger
up there, flickering in sunrise
like a pigeon’s plume, then you drift
down to your own dissolution. You have to
collect your gait, show your sober
face again as you bring the ring
back to the jeweler
after she says
no.
Smoke
How some of us carry on: quiet
kindling consonants
seeping under doors and
staggering into rooms,
feeling out the windows and walls
only to vanish. The suggestion
of your body once
lay cast in a sheet, your main points
plotted like a constellation:
shoulder, elbow, hipbone, knee, ankle.
So
I let you smolder there awhile until
the sounds of birds started from a wire.
You struggled your way into a hoodie.
Against window light, you were fundamental
outlines of anatomy.
Then your breath wept down
a pane of glass and all I could do
was face your hair, take it in my hands
and get everything going
in the right direction again.
Evan is a third year student at San Jose State University. He is studying to receive his BA in Technical/Professional writing. Evan enjoys reading and writing poetry whenever he can. He always aims to be true to what inspires him: namely, his home state of California, nature, and beauty in the mundane.