May
This is a love poem. It has no business.
It happens in that anyway world
Where the bodies are by now decided
To get all the way up, accompanied
By changes in temperature and light
Welcome and unwelcome both,
Lie down, get up, go prone again,
Get nowhere in time. I won’t
Reduce to a single preposition
A relation to the one person about it
Like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name,
Three or four even, which globe,
Without containing, her experience,
Of which I chase awareness till
Her letters are with one exception
All over this deepening sheet, name-
Blind blue of a cloudless day.
Unconcerned with property disputes,
The poem gradually permits itself
To figure grass, the blue of the sky
Because we see those first kinds
Of immense quiet as sleepers
While walking the dog in the hills
And store them for future use
As simile and metaphor, each
ancient and suspiciously free
Of present disaster. But today royally is
Blue and cloudless, this blue, this
Unironic absence of clouds over green
That makes you temporarily more
Intelligent, makes time harder to track
Until it seems it’s always been
Only this pleasure somewhere
Between hours in the form of a bell
Melting mid-ring. The poem’s now
Broken one of its rules in order
To keep ringing. Because I want to
Be smarter than true it continues
To disobey the trace of my injuries,
Remembering home is not a place
One at all leaves or gets to
But supremely anonymous
Relations with rhythm, a fragrance
Where skin meets time on which
No pronouns fall, here in the presence of.
Not lasting but repeatable and
Each of the instances claimed
For the series, belonging with the ones
That came before it, the others
Still to come but not in doubt,
Yesterday moving on top of tomorrow.
If blue were an all-day affair work
Didn’t tear us apart in, but held
As shape and song, the anonymous one
Playing on repeat, referencing nothing but
The very red distraction I attend to
Where bed turns each afternoon away
Along the suede sound of good decay
There’s still plenty of time to invent,
None of it spent in advance, then,
In intuition of every day to come,
The flowers lasting for more than a week,
Blue growing down to grass,
It would be like this.
Copyright © 2017 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.