Aubade
It is in that moment of perfect equipoise
that I love you best,
the moment just between night and day,
when the moon out the west window
is settling through the tree trunks,
casting its last cold white light,
and the first faint brushes of peach are seen
through the skylight to the east.
The moment when dawn's incoming tide pauses
and the water is satiny and still,
the surface unbroken, just before
lunar forces pull it out in a rush to the sea.
The precise moment when whip-poor-will calls
give over to the dawn chorus of redstarts,
dark and raspy night voices yielding
to clear, high flute notes of winged warblers.
In that moment of balance, you are still asleep,
long brown legs scissored under puffs of goose down,
and as I watch your chest rise and fall, the soft rhythms
of your night music pause as your foot reaches for mine.
And in that moment, our bed of last night,
crowded with the sharp elbows of urgency and expectation,
is swept clean of love's rough sand by the solar wind,
and the sheets turn silken with surety and calm.
When you reach for me,
first in your sleep, first with your foot,
you've not seen the moonset,
you've not seen the sunrise.
You have missed the moment when I love you best.
But you are that moment, and when we are apart,
I miss the turning tide,
I hear not the rasp or the flute, and
I feel not the sand or the silk,
Without you, there is no perfect moment of equipoise.
Atlantic Swim
On the surface,
I stroke
and kick along easily,
pelicans just a bit further out
skimming lunch in unison.
I think about
what is under me,
what is holding me up,
what deeper forces
churn below.
Surrounded on the beach
by chattering masks
and empty debate,
I left to swim alone,
to seek a place
where doubt exists,
where my wordless soul
can break through the crust
of certainty all about
where I can float and roll
in that fluid space
that feeds and frees me.
White Peonies
the peonies whose budding
adolescence lasted just two days
morph on one warm day
into full-blown blowsy breasts
of white that seduce each
passerby with seductive
heavy-lidded nods and
the come-on scent
of french perfume and experience
voluptuous blossoms
whose petals soon drop
in brown-tinged satiny clumps
Death Row
looking from the inside out
through a grilled window
just six inches square
it is possible to see
if you scrunch your head sideways,
across the bare prison yard
and through two perimeters
of circled barbed wire
out past the exit ramp
to a field of tall grasses
where amidst pale purple clover
and waves of white daisies
splashes of blood red poppies
reach for the sun
their days numbered
as mechanized yellow
reapers approach
© Copyright Margaret S. Mullins. All Rights Reserved.
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