KELLY CRESSIO-MOELLER
Panels from a Blue Summer
I didn't want your tears in my eyes.
- Alice Fulton
I lack the luster that my lilacs can
muster at any time of year.
A summer of torched moods, bruised
gin – dark as the sea of our newborn,
white waves of woolgathering
mavens in owl-faced conversations.
My mouth blooms bowls of
amaranth and thistle in the
melancholy shade of blue trees.
Outside my window, knots in the
fence stare drunk as bull's eyes.
Concentric ripples landlocked in
dendrochronolgy like Van Eyck's
triptychs – layers upon layers of
brittle meditations, a peeling in
reverse.
Peacocks ring the rotund rotunda,
shadow steps through the steppe
from Dachau to dachas. Up to their
knees in windbreaker trees,
chryselephantined.
A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry's
skull against the cheekbone of dusk.
This world is running out of virgins.
Too many shoes from overstayed
welcomes left by the door. Car-wash
girls with yellow semaphores pistol-
whip July, swallow sunlight
clockwise. Their closed eyes shine
with the kiss of gold coins. In
German the word for poison is Gift.
To be the leaver or the left, the
cleaver of the cleft – his language a
glacier calving, nouns vanish under
ice – the bereaver, the bereft.
The spots on his hands form island
chains he visits when lonesome. The
natives there are kind, blowing
memory darts in flashback. An index
finger itches for his revolver's cool
scythe. He tells his story to a nearby
stone, carves one word upon it:
S
o
o
n
She will miss the hiss of every
sunset. All figures in her mirror
dissolving as they near.
The rarest of Norf London birds dies
a hundred times, falling from the
ledge of her skeleton key. Carpet
burns and whiskey dick, the slide of
houndstooth over taffeta. I stretch
along the black watch where secrets
of her beehive find me in notes of
shimmering mica. She tucks her
wings and dives.
Kelly Cressio-Moeller's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Pearl, Switched-on Gutenberg, Melusine, Astropoetica, and Pirene's Fountain among others. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two sons and is on the editorial team of Cęsura, the literary journal for Poetry Center San Jose. She's at work on her first book of poems. (kellycm@pacbell.net)
Boxcar Poetry Review - ISSN 1931-1761