June Weather
Then I realize that each redbud is in bloom
& I am someone else’s sister or brother looking
for one anonymous hand to hold beneath this heaving tree,
this ragweed sky. What I mean is that it’s Saturday
& there are faces in the park that gleam like pasture-grass.
How I want to remember each tiny turn of expression,
every singularity of wrinkle that stretches
as a redbud twig from the pink umbels down toward
clusters of green amaranth: your weathered lips.
What I mean is that somewhere in this city I am desperate
as a streambank clustered with imperfect lilies.
I am without body. I am mottled and spathe
& I can’t see myself in mirrors anymore.
There are storms outside. The noise of highways and freight.
You are collecting matter: gravel and roadsides, wasteland grasses.
You lie on the railroad tracks with palms open as if to forgive,
but what to forgive? The redbuds are a whole city of elsewhere
& I am calling out to you from a window because its frame is a line
more unbreakable than our bodies, more clear.
What I mean is that the redbud is flowering & I want to recall
each universe of bud unbelievably, to see their lines years from now
when the pineweed is broad with spurs of unflowering.
When I no longer hear the noise of our freight.
You And Me In The Meadowlands Baby (II)
You wanted to know the flaming sagebrush,
burdened in beams of sun, beside a house of rust-mud
silt and rooms of heaving sorghum.
You wanted to lie in a blistered orchard,
parched with nettle-leaf and thyme;
You wanted to tear apart a freestone peach with your fingers.
But beside this blush-blood meadow,
who were you to want anything more
than the light that thieves margins of leaves,
than this fire, which teaches that language is never enough.
Because to watch seed pods-burn into torrid nothings
shows there are things we cannot touch.
Fire Weather
Our bodies make bridges on the grass
outright under a Fairmount oak
until the blue wind blows us to paper cranes.
We see that the tree between us is dying
in two ways: root-rot
then chestnut borers, so that even the base
of its high green sea paints more brown
against all the world’s blue
than the tree’s bark alone can. Our first
dead tree, I think, though they’ve been
doing this for years.
On our backs, bellies full
with summer, we sift in the grass,
two lost ships,
seas from one another.
Sara J. Grossman has been awarded fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been published in Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Memorious, VerseDaily, Louisville Review and elsewhere. Her current book manuscript, Mineral, was a finalist for the 2013 Kinereth Gensler Award offered by Alice James Books. She lives in New York City.
