Lisa Russ Spaar Poems

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:
...

I'm a sucker for a gothic ending:
for example, this opal brooch of sky,
like milk tinged with blood
...

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
...