WITHOUT THIS DREAM
One would think that life could barely survive here.
You were on the horizon. You said, Pain is an opening lever,
if we fight against the illusions. Maybe, it was for you
last summer that the birds outside my window screeched
in premonition. All of me was there, waiting for you.
Strange, and unexpected physics, suggest maybe we can never see
love coming. I said, without this dream, we are orphans.
And being a dreamer yourself, you said: You go first, Dear,
settle in. Let’s live a little, every evening. How to love?
The door is ajar, and the night sky is perfectly clear.
We were wrong to be afraid. At the end of the dream,
there is no other time or place. I unwrap your reasons like a gift.
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NEAR PRAGUE AN ELEGY:
REFLECTIONS ON VIEWING
JOSEPH SUDEK PHOTOGRAPH,
IN THE VALLEY OF THE LAIR OF A CUNNING VIXEN
The sky’s eye falls in judgment.
Relics of a lost world: wet leaves
and the rock from her windowsill.
Everything she needs to exist.
Her body’s oath is a ghost, breathing in
sleep and soul apart, walking lost
into the night. A mannequin
on the lawn, incidental, negligible.
Shadows form a private garden.
and river landscapes wear her face.
The coming of evening releases
the moon by Hebbian rule. She buries
her eyes, to forget.
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ONE GREEN EASTER
Tell me the world ends then nothing. There is no east
or west, sun dogs cross the sky, impermanence glows.
Agree to ignore death’s slipknot around our wrists.
Abandoning that list of unmarked anniversaries, I will count
the costs of the dark folding itself over morning. Enwombing,
and closing in certainty with notions of home. Maybe, all
the good that is ever coming to either of us travels in one
ever narrowing circle. Destiny is an infinite membrane of proof,
waiting and overlapping, cancelling out so many different kinds
of unfinished promises. The past is broken over my body,
reminding the day how fragile it is. What isn’t true
manages to survive, breathing in every last unmoored shadow.
In god-space, armies of truth march in lines of give and take,
The sky opens into a bird chapel. Masked in red and black stars,
evening is a prayer rustling the dirt. I am somewhere else.
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LAURA BEHR has published in The Cortland Review, Numero Cinq, The Café Review, em:me, and Sense Magazine. She was a finalist in the most recent Third Coast poetry contest, and has completed her first book of poetry, Cave Diving with Einstein. The poems in B O D Y are forthcoming in Knife, a chapbook. Laura lives in Montgomery, Alabama. She is the mother of two girls, a psychotherapist, and founding partner of MettleKardia, advising business on mental health and wellness from a combined Neuroscience, CBT, and Psychoanalytic approach.
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