I’ve Been Thinking About Love
as I read the news
gunning its engine
as it muscles
over the streets at night
as my neighbor tends
the rare rose of four percent
remission hope
as her wife touches
the belly of her cancer
and considers death—
as the soft sand of land
beneath our homes
slowly erodes.
Yes, I’ve been thinking
how love arrives like a bird
then becomes
a burden—
difficult to hold,
impossible to let go. Yet
as the world howls,
it is the bird I hear.
*
On the September Day I Help My Mother Move into Senior Living
Am I too quick? The days already foreshortened.
A glass of rosé passé.
We unwrap each plate, goblet, tureen—
a final shelving.
Yet, a vase of dahlias—.
Light traces the rooms
we sift through like memories.
The gleaming silver tea set—
heirloom doomed for crucible and torch.
I lift a file box marked IMPORTANT.
For when I die you say—
I place it beyond
reach. Then fold the linens,
make the bed, carry the empty boxes
out into a tarnished evening—
returning to the shimmer of you.
*
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com