The Paddock Review

Time Reverses While We Sleep

Every night full flush with summer’s cricket and traffic ticks,

our minds run and leap over obstacles of money, work, to do lists 

heaped on our laps. Our minds’ edges push

until we can’t see ourselves as distinct anymore, 

until we don’t know what happened then

or what we felt like once when we knew something.

Now we know nothing more and more;

what we don’t know sits with us through sleeplessness.

We’re adventurers discovering places

we’ve been to—maybe we didn’t look close enough

before, taste enough, listen enough 

while we met this or that person, 

moved through this scene to that.

What we don’t know

increases with each decade, hurls itself 

toward our closed eyes, flings 

that part of us with knowledge from bed, 

and we are transfixed with ignorance, 

thankful that we can begin

to know the world again, start from nothing again, 

remake everything from nothing.

 

The Joining

Enclosed by houses, bars, warehouses, 

in our small city garden greens grow

to untold heights. Trombetta squash sounds itself 

on our gutter, corn reaches toward sycamore 

with yellow flower tassels. With thumb and index finger, 

I pluck, pluck, harvest, harvest 

until my hands stain green, fragrant with life’s pulse, 

until emerald veins dig into mine, begin to move 

through my blood, throb with a wish to grow, 

inch their way into my heart, my brain, 

convert me to another form

meant to extend and lengthen, overtake

human objects like our house, our fence, our roof.

When my belly rumbles with the need for breakfast 

I return to my human form, 

my thoughts filled with eggs, sausage, 

greens covered in olive oil. 

At night, restless with duties, obligations,

I escape into the radicchio’s, lettuce’s, arugula’s

water pull, feel a pressure pulse

draw life from beyond my ankles, my toes, 

reach into bed sheets for dirt, loam, humus,

to make me more than a jumble of human thoughts, 

make words form between stretching synapses, 

make syllables drop from my open lips,

make meaning become firm, transmittable, 

capable of being emitted.

….

These poems are from the book Points in the Network by Gabrielle Myers (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/points-in-the-network-by-gabrielle-myers/