What Is Pure: Summer Ghosts & Then the Fire

Painting by Kathy Ostman-Magnusen


what is pure: summer ghosts & then the fire


she gives him
the skeleton of
a mockingbird chick
feathers & skull & ribs

how hard to transition on the ground
an island of thin dirt & weed
in an asphalt parking lot
peeping, peeping, gone

the mood stabilizers
keep the ocean
as if in gray
Sargasso

neither hot nor cold
but lukewarm god
spits you out—
swallow me

o whale so i
might see
a shore
break

& cats
mouths
of feathers
& no bones

she is thirsty
for his arms
for his red
mouth

she eyes the surface
an Ophelia of the corals
light like a dead honeycomb
rooms of gifts forever drowned

she looked over her bare shoulder
but he could not forgive himself
& the white noise of traffic
carried her on past;

summer ghost

* * *

never not exactly
a way it leans
in to fall
away

she laughs
i never
told
it

& she holds
her child close
plateaus stepping
wary of hard rivers

mouths of lost songs
stones that were
bodies softly
floating

(is this what
it means to
leave it
alone)

how does
a flesh
burn
this

out
there
in a field
of memory

scooped up she
gasps as if the mountains
were her hair pulled by the sun
how i want you he cries & then the fire;

how it holds: pushing thru
& then he rubs his thumb & all is lost

* * *

or how weak
she turns
a burn
slow

as a desert
calling its
own last
bluff

he cannot
speak of
what is
lost or

if Eden
tasted of
blue fire when
that bloom unfolded

all those days used up
dried out broken abandoned
pretending he had no part in the pain
this thing he cannot turn—
how beautiful it opens

what is pure leaves its
mark in being
absent—
gone

who knows
where the fire
of that star hides
how she bends away

as if to be refused were
to be shot from god’s mouth
a light that dwelt too long in presence
the shouting of her long hills
a radiance of what lets go;

on fire with the seeds of imagined stars


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on More Poetry