The Present Speaks of Past Pain
BY MAYA C. POPA
It’s that hour of dusk
when the sky is awash
in waning light, when, if we might
forgive each other, this would be
the hour for it.
I lay down beneath a yellow tree.
I understood I could hold onto the past
or be happy.
Then, nothing. You did not appear to me.
The sky filled with stars
that had been there already.
Dream Vision
BY MAYA C. POPA
A long tradition of hallucinations,
flocks in patterns that silence
the augur.
The dream tents in Gilgamesh Enkidu built
en route to Cedar Forest
so the signs would find them.
It was visions of passion I most feared,
your hands at my waist, my chin
at your shoulder—
your breath just once and I’d have been done for,
awake enough to know how grim
a dream could be.
Would have forfeit North—I’d have been
like Gilgamesh above
the slaughtered flesh
of the Bull of Heaven, dreaming his love
with a herd at night before sending
the body down the river.
I thought absence was a heartline flatlined
by distance, but nothing is nowhere,
no place is empty of you.
For each day you have not written, a large ship
has floated up the driveway; no one
has boarded or come off.
