Jennings

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Michael Jennings

Once

From the Book:

Once

(with some thefts from Simin Behbehani)

I came to you as if from a far country

The night was not quite in your eyes

but the evening smoke and the roses of your skin

met in purple shadows

I came through the vague veiled streets

toward some clarity or hunger

You were my fire in the moth-light

my confessor

You danced the stars blind under the witching moon

I crawled in your darkness like the tapping beetle

Our mouths met

Dawn in the desert is a million gold butterflies-

I lived there once among broken stones

husks of bodies

a tale of death and death and death

and women turned to salt

under stubborn hummocks of black cloth

We grow old like the cracking clay

of forgotten rivers

Soon no one will remember our voices

or the glancing light of our tremulous

tremors

Was it the wind I came on

lipping your waters

combing the sunlight scarves across your throat

So often now we are tired

and old women I once knew speak harshly

behind the curtain

and the mud of the riverbank

squelches under their feet

I came through bulrushes over moon-glazed bayous

and our bodies became snake-dancing

cranes

feathery cries

We cannot love each other forever

except as the stars do

all flame and nothingness

Our skins will grow worn and frail

as papyrus leaves

locust wings

May the burden of pain bring lightness

We lie down to take flight

like the desert sand under the scour of wind

I came like a bird of prey out of the sun's eye

to whirl you talon in talon

down the roller coaster sky

I met your eyes in the forest of being

The rest was just history

Bio Note

Michael Jennings is the author of six previous books of poems, including the collector's item The Hardman County Sequence (based on the photographs of Dorothea Lange with a Foreword by W. D. Snodgrass) and the recently released Orchises Press book Silky Thefts. He was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans, grew up in Iran, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and was a Fellow in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He lives with his wife, poet Suzanne Shane, on a hill overlooking Otisco Lake in Upstate New York.

ONCE

is a 32 page hand-sewn chapbook - $8.00

TO ORDER ON-LINE

To order through mail click here.


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