It's a poem I wrote for my--
it's a love poem.
It's called "A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noons."
"There's a lot to be written in the Book of Errors.
The elderly redactor is blind, for all practical purposes.
He has no imagination, and field mice
have gnawed away his source text for their nesting.
I loved you first, I think, when you
stood in the kitchen sunlight and the lazy motes of summer
dust while I sliced a nectarine for Moroccan
salad, and the seven league boots of your private grief.
Maybe the syntax is a little haywire there.
Left to itself, wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil.
Hay is the Old English word for strike.
You strike down grass, I guess, when it is moan.
Mown.
The field grand mice devastated the monastery garden maybe
because it was summer and the dusks were full of marsh hawks,
and the nights were soft with owls,
they couldn't leave the herbs alone--
gnawing the roots of rosemary, nibbling at sage and oregano
and lemon thyme.
It's too bad eglantine isn't an herb
because it's a word I'd like to use here.
Your coloring was a hybrid of rubbed amber
and a little flare of dawn rose in the kernel of an almond.
It's a wonder to me that I have fingertips.
The knife was very sharp.
The scented rose-orange moons, quarter moons of fruit
fell to the cutting board so neatly, it
was as if two people lived in separate cities,
and walked to their respective bakeries in the rain.
Your bakery smelled better than mine.
The sour cloud of yeast from sourdough hung in the air
like the odor of creation.
They both bought sliced loaves, they both walked home,
they both tripped in the entry to their separate kitchens,
and the spilled slices made the exact same pattern
on the floor.
The nectarines smelled like the Book of Luck.
There was a small fog off the bay at dawn
in which the waning moon swam lamps.
The Miwoks called it Moon of the Only Credit Card.
I would have given my fingertips to touch your cheekbone,
and I did.
The old monk knocked off early that night.
He was making it all up anyway, and he'd
had a bit of raisin wine at vespers."