Faith
It all begins when you lose
your first button.
You search and search for it.
You always think it has to be somewhere
between where you are and where home is.
You search and search for it.
You trace your steps backwards
and call out to it as you walk.
You search and search for it.
You hope it will hear you and answer back
from where it’s hiding on the road.
You search some more
but only to realize
that it is summer now
so there, you throw the jacket off.
When Love Cries Wolf
What you fear is loving
Another
The way you were previously loved
Or thought you were
By someone else.
What you fear is waking up next to him
Telling him what you were once told
Or what you said to someone else
You are wonderful, and What you do to me
Don’t leave, and I love you morningly.
You learn by repeating.
There are no mistakes.
The original has long left you
With the falling of your first teeth.
But what you fear the most is telling
Him all this,
Watching him leave
The room, leave you
With the white noise of light bulbs
Humming his disappointment
Confusion
Loud and louder
Until you can’t hear or see a thing
But your own love ripping through you.
No feeling. No stopping it.
Possibilities
I wear my white gown.
Read poems;
they steal my memory away.
I let a bonsai die.
Flies invade.
I forget to pee.
Sometimes I fly.
Indoors.
Outside of a hallway,
into another
loving a man
who wears bright colors,
who has a beard.
Full lips.
He lives outside.
Licks my window
to wake me up.
When I pull up the shades
there’s only rain falling.
*
Here are my hands
locked at the wrists—
two almost-fists
threading a needle in slow
motion as I watch time spill
out of the iron eye
when thread slides in.
I look at these hands,
still locked at the wrists—
an almost-heart
with two beats at the tip
realizing no two hands
will ever come together like this
not even at the altar.
Where Thought Migrates
Near the end of the book,
a pink carnation’s petal surviving
thin and dry, two pages
enfolding it like praying hands.
Hush, says this hushed little body,
at least tonight hush, put your hand on me.
The right page reads,
it’s only you and I in this world,
the left one, love me.
How then can you stick the petal where it was,
close the book and put it back on the shelf
as if you didn’t hear or see a thing,
as if you weren’t the one who stirred?
What sky caught your abandoned sigh?
Copyright © 2003 Ani Gjika