Paul B. Roth
A Slow Untying
A glass of water’s stillness is not always enough to keep me company.
Especially now when, outside my window, the prints rabbit paws press into late spring’s shallow wet snow are penning my biography.
Inwardly I follow how this thawing snow’s vertebrae, twisting and turning its long braid of muddy blonde water, replenishes then flashes through my relaxed bloodstream.
How red storm clouds, stretching my corpuscles out to sea and back, surf the pulse of each wave reflected off their darkest shadows.
How echoes of a loon’s voice offshore relieve each crumbling stone wall of what was once its sad man-made evenness.
Work Day
Rain begins as I do.
Time has used me up the way a squirrel laps a shallow wind-rippled puddle dry and from whose center everything circles away until its edge becomes that center.
My fingers try catching up but spreading further and further apart, they grasp each other in nothing more than an awkward handshake.
I try recalling if any clock ever counted itself down to its own end at which nothing, not even a neuron’s memory remained, but I have no such memory.
The only real time I seem to have is that soft pyramid of sawdust a carpenter bee, piling outside its job site, leaves me to rub between my rough fingers.
Its stimulation, unlike the way a Chopin Polonaise once spun and danced me around a hopeless room full of passionate mouths and heartless lovers,
is more like the way blood, racing through my body, insists my imagination, and not its own urgent destination, carry me the rest of the way.
Paul B. Roth, editor and publisher of The Bitter Oleander Press, is the author of seven collections of poems, including Owasco: Passage of Lake Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Long Way Back to the End (Rain Mountain Press, 2014).