Carbon Paper

The night after she offered him the door
to leave through and he opened it,
she broke into his house, and knowing
where he kept the poems she'd written
him, 10 years of poems, 10 years of writing
just for him, she took them up, replacing
them with his ugly little gun, the one he did
not know she'd taken months ago, when all
of this began to fall, the gun she did this
not to need,

                        took up the poems and drove
down to the river. Drove to the river where
he'd often taken her to fish; to wade out and cast
while she waited on the rocks.  The poems
she'd kept no copies of, the poems for him
alone, and all the others she had given him as
shyly she looked away, or at her feet, waiting
for what response would come.  And there
on those same rocks she built a fire of fallen
branches, set a fire with wooden matches,
striking them on familiar stones, not looking
at the water just for now, guarding them with one
cupped palm against the wind; she watched
the matches burst to life.

                                     And as she read
each poem she dropped it in, one by one
she dropped them in and each one flared
like love and each one curled and blackened,
turned to ash; and that small river breeze
that blew them up, black butterflies with
hearts of spark and dying flame, cast them
over rushing water, dropped them in.

Michael McNeilley

Dance of the moon and sun

There are pieces of you all around me,
they arrange the darkness and the light.
Morning sun filters in through the memory
of your hair.  I read poetry before dawn
by the light of your smile; it is better for this
than as an umbrella, as it lets in words
more readily than it keeps out rain.  When
I run the water, the bathtub asks about you,
and the morning coffee pot speaks in your
voice at times, though it knows you never
drink such stuff.  Some nights your fingertips
against the windowpane are all that hold
the dark at bay; as your love is in every
corner, telling me nothing bad can get in;
as when I close my eyes at night, I look
into yours.  Your touch surrounds me as
I wake on the sofa, the tv still on.  I would
have frozen by now without you, would have
stopped breathing or gone blind.  And this
is your heartbeat in my chest; I know the
rhythm: two beats together, then not quite
too long a pause and it repeats, moving
the blood through me, just as your breath
on my eyelids begins and ends each day.
And when you come to me in the night
you are whole again, and all is as it
should be, as if you'd never left.

Michael McNeilley

(From January, 2000 issue)