“A free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "The Double Dream Of Spring"”

There is a kind of corridor beneath the doors  
where spring leans with its questionable brightness—  
half in profile, the other half waiting  
behind a scrim of afternoon.  
Light jostles with angles;  
I move, uneasy with my own hands,  
their pockets of speculation, their inability to form  
a seamless impression.  

From the window,  
someone else’s sun—indifferent, solid—  
is pressed into a memory not mine,  
yet sticking, as a fly on the inside of glass.  
How long do we walk parallel to our intentions,  
a little slowed by pollen or thought?  
Shadows are always the wrong size:  
bigger at noon, a sliver by evening,  
sometimes not ours at all.  

Between the books of yesterday  
(a kind of handsome disorder), I imagined—  
No: I realized—  
there was an impulse for raspberries,  
for the unheard birds mapping a version of silence  
outside the deliberate hum of streetwork.  
It was not the story I planned—  
how could it have been?  
Words arrive like small accidents,  
tidying up the corners and never the middle.  

At last, the corridor resolves into a room,  
light spilling in on the wrong side of things,  
a rumor of April  
folded into the shape of your absence.  
And I remember:  
the best dreams scatter—scented, difficult—  
pulling us past the window,  
neither arrived nor departed,  
the hush between  
two possible springs.

Create Your Own Poem | Recent Poems