By: David Capps

Rose

A rose is like a flower:
pretty, pretty and round.
When terrible things
happen, and dusk flies
apart, namelessly dark,
it will still be around.

###

Blip

Irregularity
was made regular
by regularity. It
regularly regulates
irregularity. Geese
flown into turbines
at night. The head
Salome presents
at first light.

###

When I slipped from the soft breath
of your breasts in yellow night,
three cruder forms buttressed
my head and asked what love is.

Two hands separated from their respective shrines,
I said. No, they corrected,
three voices wrapped around a winding sun.

These old men fall through my shadow
like pines having fainted, whose green needles
pierce the skin of the earth and lie there awake.

You dip your hair in the river
behind me—where everything rushes,
mothlike, ghostlike, lawlike.

###

Of that this love is another likeness in your blood a passenger in your eternity
I would swim in broad strokes not knowing any better
I appeal to the kingdom I don’t understand
Verses in my mind like bees stranded in a grape
Respectively, reality is touched a ladder drops
The vowels out of the alphabet congregate in the circle that is my call
There is a long time to wait before impassioned moons rise like faces over summer
Pear trees borne rich into the august wind.

###

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in Hamden, Connecticut. He is the author of two chapbooks: ‘Poems from the First Voyage’ (The Nasiona Press, 2019), and ‘A Non-Grecian Non-Urn’ (Yavanika Press, 2019).