Poetry
by Stephanie Sears
Heart
break
Two figures above their domes hang
from strings of light
that spirit them above the damnation
of elusive cravings that hold me down.
On San Giorgio's frontage seagulls fold
resigned wings. In my heart, a sudden break...
They scissor up, sharp again,
cutting through to well-dressed forms
filing dark below
among the bare bristle of the park,
self-absorbed as if unseen:
seducers and betrayed
whose lives, once flexed with relish or despair,
now together in pairs, seek escape from
past effusions and retractions.
Their passions are buried behind
the introspecting windows
of the Giudecca,
so that as I gaze upon them
I feel myself cast in every scorned longing
they keep within.
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At
Clark's pool
Sultry dusk perspires
from the slow making and undoing of life.
Drifting roots bubble into flower,
leaves unfurl and fall in endless substitution.
Nothing short-cuts the everlasting rut
except the chimeras of darkness that slash
at the blundering heap of stars
like blades of abstraction.
Engendered by night's hangings,
brews of blood and air
the bats unpredictably surf
the intangible waves of fate.
top
Above
town
I
You stand between light and shade,
half present, half lost to dream.
It smells of heights transmuting into innocence.
Creatures approach us, prairie dog and deer
drawn to our zenith.
We met four days ago.
Your eyes so like moss beneath my feet and
the jade I sipped scrolling among the trees
whet their emeralds in mine.
I have drunk your lips too
that kiss like a swimmer pulled to a fall.
Why do I resist
this storm of hypothetical fulfillment?
II
No longer, I daresay, will I see you
but in that ever altering dream
I wear upon my person
like a dress of complex cut.
Transformed by time and space
into the impalpable intimacy
of memory and wish
ubiquity finds you
by the Lindley Pine,
snow swooning
on the street lanterns of Belgravia,
gliding on the glass of a reef-ringed sea
that is ours by all but birth,
or looped reptilian around a banyan pipe,
laughing over saffron plains.
But of this relentless match
between memory and wish
you look truest draped in mist,
fishing on a loch's raven cut
that bleeds to the Scottish sea.
***
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Before
eruption
Hypogean like tombs,
riddles have grown mossy on their beetled backs.
They are pits of distaste
steeped long in time.
In the asthenospheric soup rumbling far below,
I hear their pumice voices snap and burst.
Clothes bedizen their dry brown limbs
in wads of chromatic frenzy,
turn such women into monuments
wrapped thick to hide
from soul-grasping succubi
who tread light and supple
in parodies of nudity.
By midday they wash
their toiling breasts among the reeds,
striped clothes floating
from the lava tubes of their waists.
I cannot travel so far.
to measure the gulf.
top
Stephanie Sears is a Franco-American
free-lance journalist with a PhD in Social Anthropology on South
Pacific cultures from the University of Paris. She has poetry
published in The Coe Review, RiverSedge, The Long Island Quarterly,
California Quarterly, The Amherst Review, ArtWord Quarterly,
Poetry Salzburg, Inclement, The Hudson View.
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