Three Poems by Dah

Detachment

A thread of light:  the fog
opens, like a sinkhole, lifts
and heaves itself onto a shelf
of clear sky.  Dissolves.

What are left are memories
seared by the sun:  golden skin,
milk-blood, soft tendrils,
a thousand heavens.

I saw your radiant face
bloom and grow into a lover's
indulgence.  Your eyes:  a vine
of blue grapes.

I may be avoiding, or hiding
from, how memories cut
into the heart:  a mane
of blonde, river-musk,

silvery moonlight
rubbed with fertile kisses.
Our mouths were wolves
intoxicated with prey.

Have I mentioned that over time
I've looked for you?  My desire,
as lonesome as old steel.
Do you remember

that you covered your mouth
when I first tried to kiss you?
A perfect blush of star-fruit
trembled between us

and gathered momentum,
like prisms gather light,
nerves overheated
by a mass of pulsations.

So, why does love thin and blur
till nothing is left?--the inlet
of the heart, like a sponge,
soaking up the emptiness.



One Word

I keep writing
as if everything around me
is gone.
Deep into June, the cherries
are planets in a green universe.

I have dreamed for too long,
as if the nights are poems
lost in morning's fields:
I reach for you, in craving,
in skin.  Obsession.

A chilled stillness after a rain,
the ground is heavy, blind, useless.
The runoff enters earth,
a simple river for the faceless,
the lifeless.  Never-ending.

If I call out just one word to you,
will you know it?



A Blue Tear, Frozen

A white cloud knows its own demise,
slowly, in the sky's mouth, its body vaporized.

now the clear sky reflects a blue that affects me
deeply.

Even that woman across the street, her long,
dark coat, somehow,

shows your absence, or the state of our love's demise, and
I cannot punish anybody for the distance confusion burrows

yet the dull cold of sadness always brings me to my knees
and, still, every morning I light a wick and melt candle wax

on the grass, and dawn bursts into angels, their wings
untouched by another's hands, and I confess to them

while cupping images of you in my mind only to search
through them for something alive.

That day I watched you keeping yourself graceful,
a blue tear frozen, and your delicate wings folded,

tucked in, and pulled back from me.  I watched you,
your lips trembling and mine pale,

then I watched you form
into the past.

Dah's poetry has appeared in Sandy River Review, Stone Voices Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Orion headless, River & South Review, Perfume River Review, Miracle Magazine, Eunoia Review, Digital Papercut and The Muse, and is forthcoming in The Cape Rock, Lost Coast Review, Literature Today, Poetry Pacific, Zygote in my Coffee, Red Wolf Journal, Deep Tissue Magazine, Jellyfish Whispers, Dead Snakes Journal, Rose Red Review, and, Empty Sink Publishing.  The author of three collections of poetry from Stillpoint Books, Dah lives in Berkeley, California, where he is working on the manuscript for his fourth book.