The Way We Go On
        for B.A.C.

Your hot bath and talcum
powder mark the calendar
Saturday night as you write
me a check for eight hours
labor and ask me in for dinner.
I smell food at the door:
oatmeal and salmon
teased into patties
round as pennies on the plate.
I was in your yard all day
spreading a load of gravel,
a pink shell of decomposed
granite colored
like a salmon's belly—
but empty at this hour
and hungry for conversation.
The contours I made
in the yard, we discover
through a tiny kitchen
window at sunset, exaggerate
positive and negative space.
Daylight and gravel
give the same hue
seamless there where shadows
pulse like so many phones
taken off the hook.
The way we go on
about the yard, I think
I am falling in love
with the landscape—
when in fact
I am falling in love
with you.

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Copyright © 2011 Charles Gillispie All rights reserved
from The Way We Go On
The Backwaters Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission