(22)Poetry
by Phillis Hoge
Thompson
The quick breathing, the names in beaten air
and, after that, the healing.
Then how can I live, and how long,
in a city filled over and over again with such words
and not tell you?
I went away
to draw those voices deeper in me.
I walked with my good friend
far into Iao Valley where mist slurs
the cold ridge of the pinnacle,
and gave him there
a white, erotic flower without a name, color
at the center of paling sun.
But this changed nothing.
He knew and left me
at the jagged edge of the stream
everlastingly dragged from the mountain down.
By a weathered flat rock in the stream bed,
I stripped and got into the water.
Rippling all around me on the sleeping stones,
it broke the other sky,
the sunny images of green leaves,
and fell away, light beading all over my arms
and around my body, hanging dream-cold, stone-held,
slapped over the loosening gravel,
until the names vanished in the sound.
And maybe everything we said
slid away in the heavy water.
I climbed to a rock
and watched the sunflecked skin become dry.
Late afternoon's diffuse light brought us back to
the
city.
In the air, a noise like breath rouses,
word-shaped, like a speaking wind.
The images begin.
How long can I live and not tell you?
(21)