Wanderlust, by Joseph Milford

wanderlust

 

 

 

The sand would scrape itself

            I heard it whisper

as i breached the whitewashed torrent

            with my chest

emerging forth everclear and green

            drench-dripping in the first

positive moment

            hungry for the textures

of earth and flesh

            the mortal opacity.

I carved a monument, an easel.

            Then portrayed a pastoral.

I will try to find you there again

            around and behind every root and knoll

into the craters of every erosion and explosion

            straining

the furthest inherent peripherals.

 

The wind separates my limbs, it tousles

            the hair of the soldiering trees

I lie on my back and shape cloudshapes

            around your name

I lie here barren in your memory.

Spinning under the moon, hand in hand

            with the animals

into the torn lace outskirts of evenings

            the blue the pale the pagan

suckling an entirely different oxygen

            and I saw you there

your arms flung open

            the mouth of churches

                        spilling light.

 

I will press your flowers between the pages of a book.

I will press your book between the eaves of a shelf.

I will press your shelf into a web-haunted corner

and in the vacant room I will try to remember.

 

I will walk barefoot

            down garde npath

wrenfooted, prufrocked,

            I will harbor a love

of stain-glassed windows

            and gasoline rainbows

all the jagged mathematics

            of broken sea-glass

the multiplicity of prisms.

 

I will cultivate flowerbeds

            into festering expulsions of tenderness

cupping in bowls their resins

            of loveliness

until I arrive, trembling, blood-ready

            for the slaughter

 

 

 

 

 

— by Joseph Milford

 

 

 Copyright© 2011 by Joseph Milford. All Rights Reserved.

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p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0in 0in 0pt;”>Joseph V. Milford is a Professor of English at Georgia Military College south of Atlanta. His first book, Cracked Altimeter, was published in 2010. He is the host of the weekly The Joe Milford Poetry Show, which he maintains with his wife,  Chenelle. He also edits the literary journal Scythe with his wife from their shack in rural Georgia. Recently, some bleach replicated the Shroud of Turin on his favorite black shirt, but he does not believe in E-Bay.