Let me open the door for you

Do you know who you are when dusk stops

to chat in the fevered language of birds

Do you ever hear the broken speech of snow

sorrowing the trees or the song rising

off a lake on long braids of air roaring

like prayer leaves drifting between signs

of decay in an overturned sky while we

wait for their frail admonition against forgetting

There is an ache that strides the surface tension

of a life a gnawing that rides the unmapped

oceans of your right arm

a throbbing under the skin of this body poem

Imagine there’s no such thing as memory

no such thing as whispered desire

heaven-needing or the still-burning flame

Your plumb-line measures no depth

and you are orphan to more than your own

Today the sky calls back the sun

and the clouds acknowledge every empty word

So sing the clear short moments

nothing excessive nothing grandiose

The moon musn’t get the wrong idea

Go ahead I am listening

Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.