In the Whisper-Breath of Roses on the Baby Grand
Facing the Music
You
The Well
No Niche
Pearl
In the Whisper-Breath of Roses on the Baby Grand
Those secrets
your legs keep, eloquence
stunted by sweetness not given,
knuckles playing only
what you can and can’t? The whole
line of nation-flags might snap
as obsolete rags in cold wind in you,
in them, if you’re moved by eyes
in potatoes, by fields tilled by
worms head first into music of aquifers,
your fingertips invent the instrument,
to move this mystery of always one
minute, nevermore the next.
So what if moonlight became me.
I swallowed the aspirin moon.
An owl snags the neighbor’s
cat; velvet wings pump
up from double yellow lines.
The soft chime on my x-love’s
mantle will be airing the hour
about now.
I hear mice nesting in
fiberglass, scratching joists.
Across the road the white horse sleeps.
Tomorrow I’ll smack his flank,
dust will rise and I’ll give him a carrot.
The garden lengthens and opens
to chords of sun and rain, crumples
in a cymbal of frost.
Breezes in a spent poplar, another non-sequitur
patter of coins. This music has no score.
You have that brimming look of having
traced amorphous shapes of questions,
having stayed with evoking fascination
from surface; the unfathomed
awakens to its toil
in your eyes. You make possible the rain
to see the rain. And you love, don't you,
an unendangered thing that has taken
a sledge to its stones in your gut,
so from your eyes can glitter
a cavern without bottom.
And when stars poised me at aphelion
from where I’d meant to be when far
too green to say, I reveled
in whole notes that fizzled,
air to air. Living drink parasols
uplifted, opened, released
the tension between gravity and levity. Strings
of lucent globes on every bough & needle.
Tongue held out to a linden audition,
flowers doused, every bulging
drop tapped down,
replaced by others
just like them.
I never could live long
with my own. I left
them all, even me, for the well.
seduces. Where are we
going in all these pieces?
To clean parlors adorned
with elegant absence?
To crawl the last forest
without a light, hunted?
To know too well
and still be tempted?
Wave petals curl to tresses at the shoal
Where three gulls loft on thermals,
Dragged into sand by rake-sucks of surf,
Those same asemic V’s and scraggy diamonds.
Moon tympanum calms
A damselfly, which cannot close its eyes
But, wing over wing, rests now.
In a cottage on the hill, a composer strides
With stave and pencil to the piano.
A rare pearl reaches fruition
In a shell below on a sunken hull. The future opens
Today’s letters elsewhere. Wind posts
To the back of my hand a petal it tore from a wild rose.
Jari Chevalier's poems are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and have recently appeared in Arcturus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Concīs, The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Massachusetts Review, and Poetry East. In Fall 2016 her poem won the inaugural poetry contest at Sheila-Na-Gig Online and she was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse magazine. In 2014 she received a Merit Award in the Atlanta Review International Poetry competition and was a finalist in the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in writing and literature from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from CCNY. For more information, please visit http://jarichevalier.com
