Judith Skillman

Tasted, smelled, rising from hot asphalt, sweet rain
in the street where a man works on his camper in the rain.

Like desire, felt less often now we are old, the joint pain
...

To scissor the palm from an azure sky
men come, holding blades, unlikely
Machete taken from a drug lord whose luck
Fell when the tunnel entrance,
...

Her teacher once told her she had a wolf
inside the f-hole, beneath the G string, a sylph

note crying out when she played, like a cough
...

You walked up Tabletop Mountain
And found a skull. A coyote, dog,
Or wolf - you are not sure.
...

When she thinks back on it
The place was dull, all gray and tan,
Industrial white, no flavor other
Than the whiff of memory.
...

One gray leaf snipped finger and thumb
from the larger body
of felt. Animal for an afternoon.
No particulars save for a wan sun
...

She watches the other, her well twin,
from a distance. Sees the part
of the story where that one
...

Summer. Heat
takes the water
from our mouths,
and gives us thirst.
...

'In the very antechambers of feeling
it is forbidden to be explicit...'
- Pessoa
...

Through the long hours of afternoon,
the torture of opera wedded to scents
of rising bread, a river of cardamomv
...

Its dalliance with the earth
almost spent, the sun-disc
floating in totality -
where no one is left sleeping
...

Mother can no longer eat from the family of nightshades —
peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, all verboten, nightshades

make arthritis worse, stiffness cumbersome. In Hades
her girls lost half the year, down there, with the shades.
...

Herb and spine,
the flat-fisted dream
of stars and dew
...

A nightmare lingers long afterwards. It can be caught by a glimpse
into dreamtime: a word, a look, a resemblance to hunger, glimpsed.

We stalk one another ceaselessly, as prey. Marriage, married long since.
...

Of the sun, one winter afternoon —
the sun close to setting, one afternoon

after staring into a star too soon
and long before it disappeared: noon
...

'L'heure vert' in French equals, roughly, Happy Hour

One to go and workday's finished,
smudged like droplets against
the window. Who else craves anise-
...

Like pain it came and left by halves
and now mostly it stays on,
a boarder too poor to leave.
...

Too much to ascribe
to the heavy air
circulating false tropics,
yet more comers
...

Our dark bird of symbolism, our caw caw.
Where does the train of thoughts go?
In what order, and is the river of Lethe
above or below the earth? What about heaven -
...

Mid-March, the black and white of winter goes on pouring
images upon the window- a surface for rivulets of down pour.

Those whose lives we tend to ravish come and go of their own accord.
...