Montenvers
BY CATHERINE POND
I miss you most on days like this, riding the train alone,
locked into the earth.
After the first seizure, you promised. To think
I was the only one with a problem.
Poems require nothing less than the soul
to sustain themselves. So you take yourself apart,
piecemeal, like chopping a beautiful tree into slabs of wood,
and placing those splinters into the fire. When you drink,
the tree appears again as it once did in childhood,
the self, a silver, leafy apparition
reforms in front of you,
you want for nothing and no one,
you are full again, and green, and whole.
Kyrie
BY CATHERINE POND
Bring back the girl floating beside me in thin runnels
of gold ribbon. Bring back the halo of loose gossamer hair.
The sad, strung out voice in the last message she left me.
Bring back the worn Bible she carried like a shield.
Bring back the city and the long nights drinking, gold dust
swirling down into the express station on 72nd.
Bring back the sliding silver doors of the subway car,
her silhouette behind them. Bring back all the years
leading up to that moment when she kissed me, quietly,
on the mouth, before crossing the platform, something
we never acknowledged again, the days when I should’ve
known, and maybe already did, how bad it was,
how clever she was, to hide her addiction inside my own.
Bring back that moment just before the train doors sealed shut
and carried her off underground, when she tightened her scarf,
or turned, after a long pause, finally, to face me.
