Weeping, I count five egrets, new here and full of grace
when driving rain and a stormy sea carve a lake into our lawn.
A big yellow scare-eye balloon watches me, blown here
from somewhere in the neighborhood. I cry, too,
as customer service agents can’t solve the problems that stop
my work, stumbling over their script in an accent I can’t place.
Small things make me smile—a clump of buttercups blooming
by the mailbox, a snakeskin on the road that must have been
sloughed off, the precision of deer running the beach—
the perfect tracks they’ve left, the sexy rasp in that aging
singer’s throat, darkest chocolate, its moaning mouthfeel.
Mysterious sounds in the night—fearful stentorian hooting
I learn by morning is a great horned owl, in Costa Rica
a howler monkey marking its territory, shrieking through
hollow bones in its throat, and in the dense dark right here,
screaming like a woman, like torture, repeating and repeating,
a mystery I never solve. Things I wish I hadn’t known—my friend
visits me with her guy and they suddenly want to make love
in the middle of the afternoon. I busy myself in the kitchen
and play Creedence Clearwater very loud to muffle their cries.
She’s dead now and I mourn her and I have no one I can tell.
Sick friends are on my worried mind, like F, so involved with
his vaping and drinking, he can hardly hold a conversation.
The sweetness of your lips, love, when I lean in to kiss you, more often
than we’ve kissed for years, the brilliance of morning no matter
how gray the sky, ever since I almost didn’t wake to another day.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 1.
Margot Wizansky’s poems appear online and in many journals, such as the Missouri Review, Maine Review, Poetry East, Lumina, Inkwell, Quarterly West, and American Literary Review. She has edited two poetry anthologies and won a Carlow University residency in Ireland and a Writers@Work fellowship in Salt Lake City.
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