The Earth Knows my Secret Love
I sleep beneath the rainbow
and wake from dreams
of your humid core.
The sky knows my infidelity.
The earth, brown and
worm-etched, knows my secret
love. It is the Sabbath
here in my perimeter. This
means I pray. I pray for
more dreams, for fidelity, and
for a return to your core,
full of pure, unbroken sky.
And her Name was I am not Staying
She entered my life
like a battered dresser, all
drawers open, a
pyknic smudged with dark
that beckoned.
I opened up the last pair
of pants I owned.
She said, I won’t take this
lying down, just so
you know. I said, I don’t care,
I only came here for the
retribution. I said, I
wanted you at first, as
a balance, some kind of
statement. She said, stop
the palaver, cowpoke,
and brand me till
I say to stop. She was that
kind of wayward.
She was crazy as a star.
She spoke in fluent hurt.
And now, when I think of
her, and I do, a lot,
I remember her phony
medals, her thighs carved from
adamant, and the way she
made me a better man,
by kicking the dust out
of me, by making me survive
her unexpected absence,
like a cored apple, like
hope upon a rocking deathbed.
COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He also has two novels set to be published in the Spring of 2010, The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores and Following Richard Brautigan. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “In the Year 2525.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.