Today's poem is by Eric Stiefel

I Mean for a Thing to Be Other
       

When I think of you, I think of you as you were, lying
nude, having kept nothing but your gloves or wading through
a carpet of flowers, into the dull halo each sunset promises,
that I, mistakenly, might call oblivion, having lost your mastery
of surrender, of toil and covet, having knelt, at first to wash
the dirt from your arms, if only for the pleasure of kneeling—

I've lost until loss became a kind of metaphor, as gray scales
pooling in a jar, moth-torn from thumb-brushed wings until
the body begins to falter, erratically, out of sight, fading,
the way suffering fades in the face of further brutality—
there's tragedy, and then there's living, you'd tell me,
dappled and dust-specked, unbroken by the wind.

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Copyright © 2023 Eric Stiefel All rights reserved
from Hello Nothingness
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission