Two Poems by Don Staley

Love Leaving Lovers

Since I can but fold my quiet thoughts of you
Back into the crypt of a mind that
Cries to linger with restless memories
Of darkling dances, shuffles of love,
A hand creeping sensually around your waist,
Heads nestled in other's shoulder's warmth,
Then I'll curse the chop-logic of a world
Where toys and joys are formed and fallowed;
Where a growth of feeling becomes a cancer . . .
For the whys of a woman and man
Understate constantly--
Love leaving lovers is like a December Moon
When the nimbus gathers and snuffs light
Casting, not majestic whirls of winds, but
A crass winter-chill calm,
A death of nature, a halt too hurried to heal.



The Solitary Lover

(I am memory's unbidden ghost;
All the sortings of the other
In the now of the solitary lover)
This is a particular of forests known,
Early green shoots of, doubtless, flowers, persist;
A healing beauty falters through last autumn's leaves
A prodigal warmth; I, a ghost, am less
Than the jesting, major hand of a god yet
Past to him must be past.
Still the winter must-smell arises, taunting in fold
After fold of steadily wrinkling mind:
He stands, as I stood, in unphotographed recorded chill
Around the farewell promise of the white stone bench--
Time dopplers his voice--it wastes in the air,
Extended more than echo.
Grained and darker, the stone bench stands.
I grow in him new roses--to make whole
A man's new mind is the role of my mist.
We share a common pulse of spring;
Yet:
I wonder if her skull screams
As, at times, does his heart.

Don Staley is a retired English teacher who took a 16 year hiatus from poetry writing to engage himself as a software tester for a large financial organization.  He is now retired completely, and recovering his long somnolent poems.  He won the North Carolina Young Poets Award 45 years ago, and the extent of his published work lies in journals at High Point College and East Carolina Young Poets Award 45 years ago, and the extent of his published work lies in journals at High Point College and East Carolina University.  He is, with the help of a local group of Wilmington poets, hoping to refine his craft.  He grew up in North Carolina, and now resides in Wilmington, Delaware.