Waxin' Poetic

"While We Breathe"


Our breath takes the color of absence,
of the frozen pond behind a house
where catfish and water moccasins weave in
and out of a watery door of melting ice,
like strands of hair,
like delicate husks of long lost love.

The broken ice sees clouds shift
through a steel grey sky; sleet filters through
the silvery pores of a screen door.
through a wide gap where the wire frays --
a baseball thrown off course by a young boy
with wavy hair and a lopsided smile.

These are all our entrances, exits,
habitations of ordinary lives
where young boys drown,
foreheads tapping on ice--
while a woman with white hair chops onions,
while a man lingers behind her,
humming a song that's never known words.