Poetry Sunday

If You Were Still in That Novel Composed at the Head of the Stairs
by Cal Bedient


Listen, nothing happens. Your whole body wants to turn from slush to fire. Think of something that surprised you. Perhaps from the back porch you saw a woman standing barefoot in a hospital gown by the Mutability roses; come on now, there’s a story here. You ask the disaster in and sitting on a kitchen chair she begins to sway in time to unseen waves. Her green smell makes black pools in the table cloth and you know whatever you have always been having done to you was wounded out of her voice and the stiff height of the bed on the fourth floor of the hospital in which a pale a shudder a breathing hard escaped into stinging death. She’s crude, you think indignantly, as she laughs at nothing at all. When you open the door on a rainy mauve dusk and point the way out in your sternest manner, she kisses you on the soft center of the cheek and whispers into your ear with burning conviction that happiness might still burst into your life like a marvelous catastrophe.

Denver Quarterly
Volume 39, Number 2
(source: Poetry Daily)

photo credit: Dan at http://www.wiredgirl.com/katy/artwork.html