Lisa Russ Spaar

Return to me, cleft
of living light, scissure
in darkness, fierce,
...

Ancestral slosh, black forest
of bridge trestles, syrupy rivers of South Jersey,
O Lutheran, O German School, O being Shunned
...

Bated ruby, guru occult,
you show yourself to us
after we— in gambit of breed,
of anchorite, of wind-thieved
...

Like a balcony, seized from behind,
held up by gods no one trusts,
deity of pseudonym, of crush, ransom notes,
ropes, lies. Sometimes abandoned
...

When my daughter fights on the phone
with her boyfriend, even her side
of the story unintelligible as my pain -
...

Tantric, this cobwebbed plot,
fish-net snare hung high in goblin air:
I'm lost in love, a mazed speck
of stunned flesh, sun-puzzled, heat-eaten,
...

If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced
I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath
dusk's blossom bock, ink-musk ale
...

O silk, my throat closing around a sob.
That fly again, minute leaden tank, thread-hooves,
busy, busy, to whom I mean nothing.
Relief in this. Yet to me he's singing beside the dugout, the ditch,
...

Glazier season, thin ice,
lens annulling clavate buds,
rescinding crocus silks,
making me see time,
...

Always the scythe of hours,
now, as everywhere,
even in loral light of late winter
...

Latitudinal, agonized, this wonder
of shadow on gravestones
plagiarizing willows, hemlock,
tear-strung and haunted. Lover,
...

Defiled stile of knuckled vertebrae
lanced by stinging nettle,
oblivious lantana, exquisite cleft
...

What might she send — a wet sleeve,
or platter of brine-latticed bluefish
dusky with capers, lemons, wine;
a briar for your thumb, a mouth,
...

I want to give you
more than these words
finite as husks
or a string of barbed wire.
...

Houseless against gray glower,
juniper dank, grisaille pagoda firs,
& sounding an unplumbed sleeting
within, girlhood's obscure guilt lingering,
...

Morning's mirage, disdainful & calm
as a mirror,
held the shorn bush that yesterday
flourished,
...

Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward
other loves, river of   heaven
...

When this day returns to me
I will value your heart,
long hurt in long division,
...

Would rather be lying there? No.
Though my pillow is a backwards-wound watch.
Cream linen of another country
where I lay in troth with you, hands pressed
...

Espaliered tree of my quieting ovaries,
arched in their lightless cloister,
& his milky seed's circuitous passage there:
...