Alexandra N Sherman, Drifting, Bodies of Water (Artist Website, Instagram, Facebook)
Watercolor on Fluid HP paper
12 x 9 in
& the white doves I daydream
become marble tombstones, etched
with heartbeat-cadenced epitaphs
announcing Montale is
dead, his mouth an oak tree’s knot
swarmed with furious hornets.
I refuse to write olives
into eclogues, seaside homes
into the sirocco cleft
of the vaguely recalled.
The older I get the more
the comet’s tail merges with
the bones of the cuttlefish,
the more attached I become
to the stems of daffodils
and the smiles of my children,
redolent of petrichor
in the hours I have preserved
in stanza after stanza,
in volta after volta.
When I imagine childhood
I see myself as a figure
in a watercolor off
the coast of Alì Terme
backstroking toward the shore
against a brocade of wine-
dark waves I would lose myself
in like sunlight on the last
canto of a paradise,
like my wife’s brown hair brawling
the pillow in the blue hour,
just before she breastfeeds our
firstborn, then our second born,
in what seems one skipped heartbeat
in the throat of a minute
I hold out here, concluding
this poem by gathering
up every unsayable
thing into the photograph
of a final line break, where
the Mediterranean shines
as the cursor blinks today.