Eyeshine
BY ROBERT WOOD LYNN
Summer returning as consolation, its light
impolite and almost possible to ignore.
You called to me from the other room
to no answer, slow and sweetly frantic.
A cat splaying its paw back and forth
under a closed door. I don’t remember
what you asked, what kind of tea did I want
to forget on a shelf? I was frozen in front
of your poem the way my neighbor used to
spotlight deer specifically to shoot them.
It was summer. We were loved. The cat, too.
The light almost possible. I want to be loved again
like that. The antlers mounted on his wall.
Auld Lang Syne
BY ROBERT WOOD LYNN
The year turns itself out and I miss the having of good secrets.
The beginning of love, a stowaway in even the most mundane interactions.
News about a man arrested for smuggling live hummingbirds
stitched in his clothes on a long flight from South America.
I left the party when I felt myself eavesdropping on my own conversations.
It’s hard not to believe people are at their most beautiful
when sweating a little and leaning toward each other,
bodies licked like fawns with anticipation.
The windows left open in protest of the accumulated heat of being,
inviting the new January outside on in.
All of that has its way of disappearing in the white light of the customs office,
the implied handcuffs of a windowless room.
The man on the plane, caught because he couldn’t keep still,
a dozen tiny beaks against his skin wanting something that wasn’t him.
And in your room off the kitchen, my name you kept repeating,
the chorus of a song from a band getting by on haircuts and effect pedals.
