Flesh counters flesh, I grab your hand by Carolyn Srygley Moore

Amidst the distances within our mouths I grab your hand.

This is not hell. In hell there are no daughters

tumbling from treetops fully orange-winged.

     Amidst the distances within all nonbiblical transgression //

& I am thinking of the post-it note on the bedroom door

Do Not Trespass // we stare like fools out the window

at the landingstrip for planes & hot air balloons & skydivers.

 

Time means nothing to me anymore, history

is prehistory is the future. I take your hand to walk the alleys

 

where aluminum cans remind me of what lasts

& headlines blow past to remind me of what doesn't last //

     I take your hand amidst the chasmic echoes

amidst the echoes of what was. Our secrets merge in time

like software our secrets merge

 

like strips of sunset

like striations of Impressionism. Flesh counters flesh

as branches meet wind, or better than that.

& the black cat of cut cardboard fills windowsills with dew

of plaintive cries, high pitched. None of this is new

no, none of this is new.






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Carolyn Srygley-Moore is a 1984 award-winning graduate of the Johns Hopkins
University's Writing Seminars, a Pushcart nominee, and author of Enough Light
on the Dogwood (published by mimesis poetry). Her work has appeared in numerous
journals to include Antioch, Pennsylvania, Eclectica, Stirring, and the antiwar
anthology Cost of Freedom. A You-Tube reading is accessible at Snoest 2010. Carolyn
lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter.