Waking

Sunlight leaks through stacked slats
of the yellow blinds, opens a room,

wrens and warblers outside squabbling
loud enough to name through window glass --

he yawns, stretches, squints back
through fading sleep for dreams,

gone wispy in daylight.
Sleepers rise, as if one said "threshold"

in the tongue of sleep, plying out
into the sky and upward sweet thermals,

gliding, swooping, straining against the string
that holds them, as if they loved the far moon,

until the body tugs, insists on
the earth, and the dreamer turns, spirals,

regains the muddy shell and casts about
for a metaphor to crack open the dark.

Leaving Next Time

By peering out at sky bruised violet
you hope to trace the lost contigencies.
Weather curdles in the massed clouds.
It could have been you who will travel,

you wandering among the teak and tikis
out past the bright buzz of exotic talk.
Could have been her standing here apart,
taken to stare at sunset, jungle on her mind.

Could have been. Departure drifts like snow
against the windows of your life, darkening.
You watch her bus pull out, these stubble fields
sway to the horizon, and night falls:

the usual storm blowing in, ice
in hard pellets ticking at the glass.
Headlights force a path through dark,
dying out up ahead, away somewhere.

Draft of a Love Song

Go, little
tangle of
labials and
fricatives.
Be my
persuasion.
Coax her
like a nest.

^

Biography

James Owens lives in Northport, Alabama, where he is the editor of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review.