Melancholy Hyperbole

Poetry about longing.

Tag Archive for ‘David-Glen Smith’

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Melissa Among Flowering Queen Anne’s Lace: Daucus carota

Walking outside. You move through galaxies. Stars flowering during mid-day hours. These small white blossoms pool, clustering around. As mingling of mosaics. Broken— pieced together without any impulse to pattern: Athena becomes the sea, becoming folds of night, foaming darkness of your hair pulled back from your eyes. Believe me, reluctant muse, even with silence, the mere action of you holding a reed of this plant to your lover represents […]

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Poems from Another Country

His voice: a train in the distance. Grackle–call. Rusty screen door. Smoke-filled memory. I dream of him wearing a coat of flames, blue-tipped divine fire burning, a holy roller, or perhaps as something other, a saint Christopher set on the car’s dash, even though the prayers sent out to him became redacted retroactively— along the Mississippi blue deltas I shift his form to the gift of poems from another country, […]

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Found Fragment 3

—the times I slept alone, dreaming my slack body over you, your winged shoulders spread, your back carried the weight of my body— the heavy weight of the horizon. My trembling hands translated your form into a winged Assyrian bull, a support of my desire, as a figure of myth, circling, or a broken recording: Beethoven’s sonata number fourteen, opus twenty-seven in an endless loop, coursing through the blood, in […]

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Found Fragment 2

Some mornings, after an hour’s run, after a slight shower, I reconsider my body, still damp with steam in the bathroom mirror, glowing with a persistent light. The skin gains a halo, a quality that almost seems religious, as a self-portrait by Schiele, reds and greens accenting the lines of the form, a figure framed in self reflection, in the blur of early hours, when time becomes an old man […]

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Found Fragment 1

I cannot justify my wanting you still, even to myself, even on days like this, when I wander, lost in a haze of past lives.       Was it nineteen o’ two or in nineteen twenty when we first met seven years before my grandmother’s birth?   Under remote bridges you hesitantly let me kiss you, a calculated risk worth chancing among the needles, used condoms   but no, that was nineteen […]

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