Tuesday poem #435 : Lesle Lewis : Reading William and Gertrude

 

 

 

“The feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have,”  he said.

Empty space too.

She said, “ A sentence is not why they were worried.”

That’s why we write them.

This is our easy time.

This is our hard time.

Winter is a spider in a jar with only lettuce to eat and  the lettuce to be eaten.

Dave comes to fix the garden shed door.

Shadows of the spoons make us swoon.

We dig into consciousness.

Heart.

Duration.

We invite a lonely word into our home and cook it a full sit-down meal.

Are we using your mental categories or mine?

Some things we remember once and once is enough.

Discontent or discomfort.

Fog or frog or both.

Well-worn or virgin  paths. 

When William’s and Gertrude’s minds met it was all the stars and moons.

We want them to meet again.

And to be a little wanting is all right because to want and then to get is so great a possibility that to be without desire would be sad.

 

 

 

Lesle Lewis' collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot's a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014), and Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence Books, 2019). Her chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan