every word, every line she said. Her breath.
He was a speckled trout in a deep pool at dusk,
the mayflies occluding the smooth surface,
like rain on a window after the storm.
How the poems moved him, you could see it
in his glistening eyes, as if backed by starlight,
the words holding up a deeper promise.
She should’ve seen the warning signs.
Or maybe she did, and ignored them—
the way uncomfortable truths, disguised as hope,
led us astray, and so we believed what we wanted,
and fell into that convenient offering,
because the bed is a prop, the backdrop to a story,
but the actors have already left the stage.
And so we fell into tangled sheets, playing at love.
The heart takes solace where it finds refuge.
And the river always whispers of darker shores.
At the reading, there was that same glow in his eyes,
as a poet read the hard terrain of her poems.
I think of how we confuse the poem with the reader
instead of the mouthpiece of a larger truth.
I let him go like the fading stars at dawn
drifting off, setting sail for another shore.
8/23/23 Write On! with Susie Terence
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