Wick Inside Flame
Later, the seahorse,
Long-snouted and swooned
Into its green corset of glass,
Dangled from a nail
In our kitchen window,
And when the sun
Eclipsed the horizon,
It pinked.
It had been what we’d taken for ourselves,
From a room of fragile things,
In a shop on the river on a day
When again it was the three of us,
And we were accumulating time
For after this.
We’d walked the canal first,
Behind the poet’s house. Walked
Lambertville and the bridge
Above the Delaware,
And we’d called the white geese
Swans, for the romance of it,
And leaned to catch a feather,
And said to each other,
Or I said to you,
I remember snowdrops.
Last night, washing my hands
Of the lavender I had planted
And watching the seahorse pink
Above the sink, I stole this image
Of ourselves from the day we had
Squandered so that we might be saved:
You brushing my hair from my face
For a kiss, our son too tall to tame.
“When the Children have Gone to Bed,” Carl Larsson (1895, Sweden).
This is the second of five poems shared specifically with Commonplace Living’s readers written by award winning author Beth Kephart.
Beth Kephart
wrote poems before she wrote books. Then she wrote poems while writing books. Now she writes poems because they force her to find and say the one singular thing that she still hopes to find a way to say. Her essays, books, teaching, and thoughts can be found at bethkephartbooks.com
