The Sway
(A Love Poem}
So many years I dripped
your jade-clear love, my absinthe on
a melting sugar dream.
I knew the greenest green
that thrives above the ossuary
sprouting summer flowers made from bone.
Grey birds, their long legs trailing,
flew above the estuary. Water blue as
babies' eyes threw back the light of day
like knives to blind us as we rode upon the Sway.
You were born
to sit a wild-eyed horse in panic run
through the rainwater of a subsumed road,
to write the outlines of what never was
across the broken tips of Time's last rhyme,
to pick me like a lily in the dawn
then pass my velvet shadow to the moon,
gone like summer light that winks away
when caught in flagrant congress with the day,
like laughter floating out into the Sway.
So rock, sweet night, again tonight
as you have rocked so many times before
across the green expanse of yesterday.
You have a keener eye than bird of prey,
more melody beneath the fallen sun,
more teeth than any soft umbraculum
who tears the coral's painted skin away
and sucks its sweetness from the drying gore.
Rock before I wake and lose the way
just before I follow Love into the Sway.
May 2025
posted for Word Garden Word List
Notes: Umbraculum umbraculum, common name the umbrella slug, is a species of large sea snail or limpet, a marine gastropod mollusc ...found in tropical to warm temperate parts of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, where it feeds on sponges...It has roughly 10,000 teeth in its mouth at any one time and will go
through approximately 750,000 teeth during its lifetime of up to ten
years..."~wikipedia (I have used my recently renewed poetic license to substitute coral for sponges.)
Images: The Green Fairy, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use
Blue and Green Music, 1921 ©Georgia O'Keeffe Public Domain
