One Night, Three Augusts Later

One less person standing

solitude

or prostrate between bleached sheets

fringed and unraveled.

Maybe it's beyond me to care at this point.

Pity is an unconvincing emotion;

either that or I'm just cold,

lamentable;

something I've chosen not necessarily

out of necessity.

At least I'm still honest

(most of the time).

I used to stay and watch the outcome.

Now situations remain unborn

last term

full belly;

pregnancy, always in my dreams, is more of a state

than a baby.

In waking, it is the blood of someone lost to me

years ago

before I grew up and started acting like a child,

before I was asked to be one.

It's amazing how much a man could want to

take care of me

years after he should have.

Pity, that emotion again, taking the place of a softball

thrown in earnest in

my own back yard.

His intentions good, I'm sure

but is it too late for intervention,

for intrusion?

I try coping

challenging

coaxing

drinking

crying;

when I'm alone in the car,

when moments of melodrama strike me

(or are those the moments that reach sincerity?)

Why can't we just leave these things be,  

I ask

forgetting the effect it has on me;

pretending I don't keep finding you,

weak and integrity-less, in

every other man I find.

As for me,

I don't know what happened or

where I went:

disappeared on an empty beach or at the

end of the world.

I know my answer already:

it's no.

No, and I don't know,

are two things I seem to be good at these days.

Disgusting as that sounds when it's said to me

I've actually gotten used to it;

grown to like it

feel comfortable with it

much like

go away

and

I really do need you.

1993-94

Refrigerator Poem

Elaborate tongue like music

chanting

A storm, delicate and

enormous

screams above me.

2000

Moon Tide

And the tide rose:

we, up to our ankles

if we dared to linger.

The glow of orchestrini lights cast

long shadows on the slanted

cobblestone plain of the square.

A cat scurried under our table

as a crowd gathered to hear

Puccini lovingly massacred

by the quartet.

It was he who first noticed

the pool of water that

spread in sneaky, steady progress.

We are married, the union so new

that passport names

have gone unchanged for this bridal tour.

Yet we feel as ancient and settled

as the vaults and piers

holding a cathedral

above the sea.

Water, a black amorphous shape:

its gloss reflecting spires,

marble, mosaic,

centuries of Empire and plague;

reaching

as though craving proximity

with everything in its path.

And the tide rose:

splashing against the docks and

over the edge of the street

where it met the canal in descending,

moss-covered marble stairs.

Once, the Dodge’s wife had stepped from her float,

up the flight, and through her palace;

her children playing in the courtyard,

(her husband passing sentence on traitor and thief).

As a child

I imagined this and other tales

that grew from dark narrow corridors;

cobbled footpaths among liquid streets. 

Little changes in twenty years

in a place that does not

change often in four hundred.

We grow, we learn, we marry.

We return as adults and

bring our spouses with us,

back into past journeys,

adventures we wished they had shared.

The water ripples closer now:

the cat,

whose tail moments earlier

had grazed our knees,

has perched on dry wicker several tables back.

We are two in this,

apart from the crowd;

at the beginning of a marriage,

of a life together.

In concert,

we pick up our coffee

wordless

and join him.

2006-2010

These works, and others by Erica-Lynn Huberty are protected under U.S. Copyright laws (title 17, U.S. Code).

For permission to re-publish any works

please email:

elh@ericalynnhuberty.com