Michael Daugherty
LIVERPOOL HANDS
She smelled of gin and Lime
Street station, gestured at passing life
with a hand that flew away on flights
of fancy, crash-landing on mine
time and again in a blaze
of high-octane laughter that billowed
about us in clouds of joy belied
by the pain in her eyes
when she lifted a glass
and thought her mask still safely in place.
Twenty years beyond just once, I chase
a memory to that last
train in London, not quite
fast enough to catch the me of I
who wave scarred and untouched hands goodbye
to any chance of twice.
LINES AWAY FROM A CITY LIBRARY
Again, somehow, the smell of bruised grass and schoolgirl
dampness, green wood singing on a camp-fire designed
by a man's mind, fussed over for the sake of childish
fingers unsure of the moves allowed by the rules
of a sudden new game. Again the sway and wave
upon wave of ripening grain; again the sweet
slow feeling of awakening not quite completely
from maybe a lifetime’s dream. Four-wheeled cows now
graze
upon asphalt grass, strange new birds add twig after
brazen twig to bigger and bigger well-feathered nests.
Nevertheless, again the savage tenderness,
the wordless effusion, the hair-trigger laughter
that scattered hot shyness all over a meadow,
shot two childhoods dead. In this crackling autumn room,
it is a cloudlessly midsummer afternoon,
book-lined walls wild-flowered, untamable hedgerows.
HALF AND HALF
1.
Half-asleep, I conjure you
making your midnight moves
in some chic new cave,
aching for a brief love
to stretch your smile until it
hurts nicely, wipe clean of words lips
designed for half-meanings, articulate
in whispers, breathless shapes,
the kind of promises hard
to remember afterwards.
I follow you down the dark
backstreets of my condition, park
my pain at a discreet
distance, listen to the beaten
heart drumming out a dim,
insistent rhythm.
2.
Unforgiven sins and stale cigarette
smoke claw the throat; perfect
in her every flaw, my embittered wife
dreams innocently of a better life,
taken again and again by a rough man
with money enough and smooth hands:
victim of fate, treacherous glands, the kind,
calloused man who turned up in time.
Her unkissed mouth begins to murmur
bits of all but forgotten summer
songs once known by heart, sung
outside promenade bars by strangers young
enough to be lifelong friends
at first sight, loyal to the end
of many a clearly remembered
misty September.
3.
Half-awake, I breakfast
briefly, shake a literal fist
at the enemy upon all
my life's figurative walls.
Alone, seeing neither you
nor my wife exactly, I construe
my lines for the looming day
as best I can, as aptly as a fey
grasp of grammar permits.
I let the cat in, sit
mesmerised by the simple
poetry of tongue and milk,
liquid purity of pink and white:
lulled and lapped by what
silken tide of innocence,
what warm waves of once.
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