Poetry

Beginning

After I do, toasts, tears
songs and kisses, after this

comes love's long reward,
an unrolling of hours you'll

regard one day, surprised
at the world they've made.

Today your view is ahead,
the unplanned forest

your own. Today you take up
against the unknown

love's torch, its warmth
and blaze, its solace, its strange

equations: the more closely held,
the more wide flung,

the more given, the more gathered.
Long have you been approaching

this mysterious dim grove.
Now you step, arms linked,

carrying fire and comfort, into
the lit trees rich

with fruit and seeds
waiting for you.

***

Originally published in Wedding Blessings: Prayers and Poems Celebrating Love, Marriage, and Anniversaries, edited by June Cotner (Broadway Books/Random House, February, 2002)
Copyright © Dorothy Wall, 2002. All rights reserved.

 

Left

I was reading when I heard the fisted slam
leapt to see the pigeon's reeling, back-pedaled flight
its intimate body oiled on glass

as if instead of giving itself
with instant blind might it had
posed for days while an artist's

fine-tipped brush lined each breast-feather
one by one in banks of overlapping
fringe, a hint of beak pressed to chest

suggestive and spare, that eye, white and
bare, a bony upswept wing.
Each morning sun illuminates the ghostly

moment its swooping, unplanned
path quickly changed. I'm left
to witness, aren't we all, what I choose—

the whacked, unsettled stare
bristled plume, brush-stroke wing, all there
until early rains.

***

Originally published in Natural Bridge, No. 10, Fall, 2003
Copyright © Dorothy Wall, 2003. All rights reserved.

 

Sleeping with Books

We buy books we will never read
and keep them by our bed.
We sleep better this way

in a room piled with words, ellipses
passions, electricities, stacked
on bedside tables, dusty shelves

amassed on the cedar chest where the
cat nests, all those
epiphanies, their specter

and possibility around our heads.
Theories of civility, virility
Faust's wager met

Darcy's wedding set—
that intoxicating moment pen leapt
those mercurial flights

we collect.
They would be aghast
those thousands of minds

at their questionable, cobwebby fate
as ballast to our dreams
but we appreciate

lucidity subsided into consecutive
lines, into grammar, Times Roman
this strange and soothing weight

as our minds slip into that
other intelligence, uncontained
inchoate.

***

Originally published in River Oak Review, No. 15, 16, Winter 2000-Spring 2001
Copyright © Dorothy Wall, 2001. All rights reserved.

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