APPLE MAE PANDIAN

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

Image by Fabrizio Verrecchia

Surrender, This Time

You’re no Hercules, love;
you can’t hold us up for long.
My world, you see, is heaped
with pebbles after pebbles,
boulders after boulders from graveyards
so heavy I sank six feet below.
The fear in me weighs a ton or heavier
your veins may split and scream.
Your back, now a perfect arc, a halfmoon
bridge, these crook bones I would like to hold.
But I have grown too soft,
my body too papery from working
in your cellar at nights, smite,
smite, smiting you to death.
I’m no featherweight, love.
Put me back down.
I’m not worth carrying.

August On My Mind

“And what am I hanging around for,
riddled with what his silence said?”
Anne Sexton

I wish I could write a poem
out of your silence, out of a dream
I once had that we sat next to each other
in a bus, unsure bodies touching,
about seeing your hands close, open.
I think of them as doors you want me
to enter, line after line
on your palms I walked. I have seen
the desert. I have seen it wild,
this tempest, this space in your heart
I cannot quite fill.
I have to know if everything returns to you,
if loving you this much puts me back to sleep
and when I wake I am I,
I am yours.
But this is a poem out of my ingenuity,
out of something that never happened.
My mind a sewing machine,
a craftman, a wordsmith, always
cradling a thought.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked,
but the eyes were enough. This time
they showed me the vastness of your ocean.
They told me I might drown.
You looked away, and August left.
We said goodnight,
and the night lengthened.
The quiet came.