Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Nine Winter 2005 |
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Moonleaves Near Anzio, 1943 Tom Patterson The moon that night curved and swayed, a swung vanilla hammock in a summer sky; that night, bits of your pictures rubbed into confetti clung together in your khaki trousers milled from your running, lunging, falling, a dreadful ballet of ruined and smooth legs and arms crumbled in their uses all at once. In three days they'll find you at last and lift your lithe body up, and heft it on their shoulders while sister, father, wife, and mother sprinkle from your pockets their white dust will float to the ground, part of air and earth again. Tonight, though, if you could only feel and see this sepia-stretched sky, you'd say it's just as you always thought it would be if this time ever came. Now the lined fingers of many dying leaves of brown and orange-brown crystalline enfold you and fill your hair with their softly pushed breath; emptied and over, they clutched at the white moon, for two hours, dusk to deep dusk, their hands wavering and their many fingers crisp and curled; then, they came down the air for you, to warm you and, failing that, lay damp and still with you in the dark. |
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About Tom Patterson |