Learning to Wait

I want to write an elegy to the edge of shade

in Spanish I almost understand, strange trills and clucks of tongue;

a sestina for the repeating ellipses of branches blown into dance;

a mambo ballad that’s been tuning its chords in twitches

of fingers that don’t pluck a note but know their tone and bend,

like murmuring banks where smiles from far-off tables

rise to meet needles and fall into the wind of a creek.

I want a sonnet for the place between your thighs,

the jeweled quiet there, the margins of that space,

like warmth of a dream you’re just conscious of but haven’t left yet;

I want to hold the line, to say: Here. Stop.

And point to bark of eucalyptus, late fall,

returning to leaves, cracking to speak a last flame of day

in a curling, slow sun, so dry it can only mouth its ending.

“Learning to Wait” was first published in Prairie Schooner, Winter 2004.