Charlotte Cassanell

Charlotte Cassanell Poems

The Best Poem Of Charlotte Cassanell

Monday To Friday

Receive me,
into chest and evergreen wilderness
I look on to the moon-brushed coast
winter licking polished stones,
coming to rest under fingernails.

This sleep,
Counting nights unconscious,
to the morning we build the house anew.
Paper walls stretch thin,
I hear you plan.
So thin, your body I picture,
splintering pine with a rusty blade in the yard,
these paper walls let in the thwack and panic.

You build the woodpile,
to keep me from shaking, to cook food we haven't got,
and burn our spices so we may have affection.
Just forget our hungry throats,
in a world without discourse.

You build the pile high, and harvest soot.
In spring we dye your clothes black,
so you may flee in the night to find another,
and I may wake alone,
beside wrinkled sheets with a future scent of lavender,
fresh mud, and a new lover.

A new house of cedar,
build up around me in my seven month slumber
from November
sharply ending in April by your need to leave
and leave love marks, on thawing skin.
Goodbye notes on the kitchen table,
Elk in the garden
a sadness forgotten in the margins.

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