Recognition
If I had known I would pass
from longing into longing
I would have left your house
before that evening, taking with me only
the sensation of eyes before skin.
But because we had already come
through the arches of an arroyo,
silently, through spring’s noise, my mind lingered,
still in the woods – mistaking
what the wind had rendered
for the movement your body
never made – only the quaking
silver aspens.
You
for Matt
Hardly had I known
the buck staggering out of the field
then you, staggering, before me,
striking the posture of wheat
before wind, trembling and vertical.
When I think of you
it is how I think of those antlers,
flexed and bright like the moon, half broken,
a crest of silver that shivers
into the river beyond the field,
through the blue muscle of the dark water.
Hannah Bonner’s poems have appeared in Oyster Boy Review, The Cellar Door, Asheville Poetry Review, The Freeman, The North Carolina Literary Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina. Her essays and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, Immersion Journals, The Fbomb, Luna Luna Magazine, Misadventures Magazine, Lumen Magazine, and ROAR Magazine: Reflections on a Revolution.
Featured Image by Madeline Graham