| Beverly Burch USA
Perimenopausal Lovers One is flung out across the luxurious field of their bed, riding down dark hills of oblivion toward the night universe. She coughs like a bear headed towards winter. The other enters quietly, retrieves bedtime things and tiptoes downstairs to the guest room. She settles into her own den of tissues and cough drops, water bottle and pills on the nightstand, and soon falls over the edge into a midnight landscape where all lost love is retrievable. One gets up to the bathroom, the other stirs. One tosses in night sweats, so the other has chills. They’ve moved into a shared terrain so vast they do not recognize each other even as they meet. In the morning they will only ask, How did you sleep? and only get, Good. I feel better. Not plumbing the deep blue song spinning through the silent spaces of their life together. publication credit: Many Mountains Moving, vol. 4, no. 1
Reflections at Gualala Point
—for Susan Burch Six days together, bolted with light— a sun of extravagant brilliance for that fog-bound coast, and you so intent, burning to stay alive. Two months later I’m here without you, everything still kindled, even the fog, a purplish flush blooming over water. Yesterday by the hidden pool I sat where we sat, a curved cypress limb, heard you saying your luck wasn’t hard, not like some others. On the beach I swear you rose again from the waves, gleaming in that white nylon running suit, gauzy Venus calling forever into the wind, arms lifted, sleeves opening like wings, reflecting the shimmer, sun on water. I went back to the tiny chapel, its strange design squat like a mushroom, stained glass windows shaped to the landscape. When we were there, you felt some presence. It might have been your own— just off, just the near future. It’s still there— as if you learned to release yourself, infinitely thinned, pellucid, transparently embodied in the air, the water, the earth here. As if you’ve become wave and particle, transmitting. It might also be me, through sheer longing receiving signs of you everywhere. publication credit: Santa Clara Review, vol.87, no.2
It’s Your Body I Miss Now You were so private, hiding the body’s changes like a guilty child knowing you had done a bad thing, growing old. In the end you surrendered and I washed your flesh like precious porcelain, as if you were not my mother, but I was shocked too. Afterward we held hands, I stroked your arm, we talked as before. Your skin always so lovely, a fine soft silk, exquisitely sensitive, could not bear even a label at your neckline, an unfinished seam. The needles, tapes, tubes turned it to storm clouds. One afternoon, a dark September rain outside, I sat by your bed, my arm lying next to yours, and saw what I haven’t seen for years, how young I still am. What you needed—you needed to be gathered up, held. Instead, twice I crept into your bed, curled around you as you slept— in April when I thought we’d keep you, in September as you were leaving. Five nights ago you visited my dreams. I was frightened. We didn’t speak but I touched your arm and it was warm. That’s how it was at the end. Each time I returned, we talked again, necessary words. But only through your body did I find you. It must have always been how we knew each other. publication credit: Calyx, vol.19., no.2
Kayaking Close to Shore Three times the call of the kingfisher rattles over us as she veers in flight from the forest, suspends herself mid-air like a creature stricken with infinity. Then she drops, a blue rocket into the frigid waters of Puget Sound. We drift around the cove, never far from the wooded shoreline. We’ve been warned: Don’t venture out, water this cold’s fatal to a four-year-old. Parenthood curtails us again—nothing to explore in a terrain of safety. But our cove is a revelation of the patient world. From this angle, west to east, the island’s knobby ridge is a beaked head, and its flanks of fir and redwood form a winged creature rising off the ocean floor. On our slow paddle we taste ribbons of kelp—tart, salty lettuce—and blow the hard bulbs like great horns. The gravelled beach slips from indigo to green, sea urchins lilt on the tidal floor. And there’s the kingfisher, who’s been elusive all summer.
Back from Hawaii Last week we warmed ourselves in predictable sun. It rained daily, but light spilled through clouds, and the sky pieced itself together, blue with indigo.
On the Big Island, volcanic and primitive, wild orchids, hibiscus open shamelessly wide. In Oakland, it’s bleak January, cold I’d bear more easily if not for Hawaii. Island life goes on. How can it be, while we’re lost in winter? A mystery. And that your feelings differ so essentially from mine. © All Copyright, 2001, Beverly
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