Three Poems by Linnea Harper

Cactus

This potful of cactus

is a desert. It prickles

and blooms.

If you were here

you would be napping

in its shade,

covering your nose

with your sombrero.

Your fingers would be

picking perfect chords

the way they did

when you dozed off

and I ran four light

fingers down the full

length of your arm

and held them there

like strings

for you to play on.

While I’ve got you in this pot

I’d like to talk.

These indoor winds

are drying out my skin.

I feel the old scales falling

to the floor

and belly through them

limbering my cool reptilian

coils.

I leave a thinning trail

for you to follow when you

wake

in case you’d care to strum

these desert bones.

A Grievance 

The heart stakes out its own metaphor:

Creaky timbers shore the entrance

to a shuttered mine.

The wood sings, it moans

as the delicate balance that has held

since the last seismic shift

slips, rips cell from cell

clean down the center lines

and the structure collapses.

This was the site of the portal

to a delicate rape:

You made false time.

I waited like the mine waits

for a shaft of light

and settled for the usual:

perfumed hair, silky smooth legs

and clean white sheets

that I twist in my sleep

into a shroud for anticipation.

Chilled  

                                                      

Chilled, you say.  As in— somewhere between

five minutes in the fridge and packed in dry ice—

the right way to serve Chardonnay. Chilled, like

a gust of fog off  the ocean slapping you hard

at the edge of truth-- no hat, no mittens. As in,

I’m standing here wet and naked with no towel,

for Chrissake! Or, Keep that kidney on ice till we

land, doctor!  As in hung out, calmed down, or

frozen out of something you had hoped to warm to.

Chilled, you say, as if a personal climatological

data point could clarify as much as a good hard

swallow, or a cold crystal goblet whose wet lip

moans your song as my finger traces the rim.

Linnea Harper lives on a tidal slough on the Oregon coast, near the mouth of the Alsea River. Her poems have been published here and there, including in CALYX, and she has been a finalist for the Bunchgrass Prize. Before she was a poet, she was a social worker, and before she was a social worker, she was a poet.