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Suzannah Gilman
Libertine
I left you just before twilight
in the day's last gleam, when the moon
was still awakening
in the margin of winter sky,
and I, warm as any August afternoon
from the clutch of wanting you,
followed sudden taillights home.
I passed neighbors
chatting on cool lawns,
a man stooping to gather oranges
under a solitary tree, and came upon my own
street and scene: my children trampolining
through falling shadows of oak leaves,
our dog barking to greet me,
the white moon mounting the low sky,
smooth and libertine,
and just enough dark
falling around my house
to make me wish I were some kind of creature
who didn't mate for life, nothing
like the geese skimming our lake, something
like my children in mid-air,
turning, twisting,
caught up in the moment
only for the moment,
something that could fly and fly.
The Draw of the West
I want to buy a wide, blue sky that stretches more than one-hundred-eighty degrees,
the way you said the sky in Denver was today from your cell phone (sounding
as if you were three streets over), stealing time from your life
and pouring it into mine to try and smooth some cracks.
I read in the NY Times that real estate in normal people states like Indiana
is priced sensibly despite the out-of-control market that made houses like mine
appreciate more than 100% in seven years -- how lucky was I, I've asked myself,
but then the market dropped and here I am--
so I told you while you're in Colorado to scope out that western sky
and a real estate magazine or two, taken from a grocery store rack
next to the automatic glass doors, and let me know if it I'm not too far out there
when I think maybe I can buy some land in a state I've never set foot in,
a plot to build dreams on, a place to escape to with you from our regular lives together
once we've sorted out these separate lives neither of us is too happy with
nor too unhappy about to change just yet, and somehow like in a movie
end up together and have a place to pop open a can of beer on a front porch
and make love right there on the splintery planks with no one watching us but elk,
maybe a prairie dog, out there beneath the fathomless sky.
©2013 by Suzannah Gilman
Suzannah Gilman moved to Central Florida from California in 1971.
A licensed attorney, she graduated from Rollins College and the University of Florida.
Her debut chapbook of poetry, I Will Meet You at the River, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2013.
She has published poetry, essays, fiction, and nonfiction. Her poems have appeared in
literary magazines and anthologies including
The Florida Review, Pearl, CALYX, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Family Matters: Poems of our Families,
and
The Rollins Book of Verse.
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