Three Poems by Daniel von der Embse

Requests

 

Play for me please

something from memory,

known by heart, yet imagined

for the first time as if

the wound were fresh

 

Play for me a song broken,

a melody left open, tossed

onto the side of the road

waiting for the next one

 

Please play it slow and

loud, and torture the music

so that every dropped note

is heard like shattered glass

each one felt against the skin

 

And when you are done

pick up the notes and set them

by the door to play again when

the next one comes, the same request

as if the wound were fresh

 

Roller coaster

 

Words drink too much,

turn the conversation

into broken glass –

brittle, bloody

 

Some careless thing

gets held onto,

an act once shaken off,

Becomes unforgiveable

 

Eventually

the riding up and down

becomes too much

and we resolve there’s no use,

 

That’s when tears come,

feeling that unhappy together

is more bearable

than miserable apart

 

We have learned

how to make room

for each other

on the roller coaster,

 

to keep our places,

hold onto our seats,

so that we might learn

to love the ride

 

 

As when you were here

 

In the house I keep

to remind me of you,

I wait for your return

to bring life back into the room

 

Your hair never cleaned

from the sink or your scent

lost from the bed, everything suspended

since you went away

 

On the table, the linens

brought back from Italy

soften the hardness of miles traveled

before we rested here

 

The front door kept unlocked

for you to enter without a knock,

nothing that could delay you

from rushing back to me

 

The creak of the hinges pitched

exactly as when you were here,

nothing changed

but the counting of the years

 

 

Daniel von der Embse was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, educated in Catholic schools, and graduated from Ashland University with a B.A. degree in Theatre. He began writing poetry after a four-decade career as a copywriter for advertising agencies in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. His poems appear The Missing Slate, Across The Margin, Harpoon Review, Decanto, Poetry Pacific, and Poetry Quarterly.