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Leonore Wilson
The Roses
Against the window will not bloom --
they see us face to face,
bellies, hips, thighs
leg over leg like bent blossoms;
they see us in the early morning
devoted to union, as if the rain and
mist of our song could hover
in mid-air like the eight-string
burgeoning of the thrush’s
voice, or the fecund blending
of the summer grasses
as they bend and roll
in the threshing tail
of a strong north wind;
the roses would climb halfway
up the trellis and hang
as if suspended there, voyeurs
arched high, bewildered, peering
like children seeing sex
for the first time, shaken awake,
hearing heaven itself twisting
and moaning, a cry in the far shed
of dawn, when sperm and egg
met, when their parents’ blood flowed
backwards as it did once
into their own soft eyes.
Linden
The way they cupped water
in their hands
as if it were a
baptism, raising the winter
run-off above their
heads, the liquid rushing
down like flowers --
Wasn’t it the day
after he had told her
about his indiscretions,
or the morning of,
when I saw their naked
bodies, pale-white
as my blossoms
moving in the stream-bed --
And who could tell
if that sound they made
came from sex
or despair, such a language
humans have, nothing
like the earlier
singing that filled
the radiance of my foliage.
©2007 by
Leonore Wilson
Leonore Wilson has an MA from UCD in Creative Writing.
She has won fellowships to the University of Utah and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts.
Her work has been featured in Third Coast, Quarterly West, Madison Review, Laurel Review,
2RiverReview, California Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, and other magazines.
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