Collecting Stones
Stalactite quartz I found in Ozark.
Gray galet with intersecting lines
I carried from Nice to Amsterdam.
And another from the afternoon
we ferry to Bellagio like lovers
in a silent film. I wonder,
crisscrossing Lake Como,
cypress trees to gazebo, terrace
to port, if we are those lovers?
Our hands wrap as we walk
cobbled, narrow streets
to the back of Hotel Serbelloni,
past candy stripe umbrellas
and garden statuary, gelato
and Limoncello, church bells
and window shoppers, down
a desire path to the rocky shore,
where we strip in daylight,
and a silver of skywater paints
your back as we crawl in shallows
until we are floating timeless.
You are not yet my husband.
I am still deciding who to be,
each of us a mirage to the other,
but our want holds us in that glacial
carving, a day so blue the edge
of my gaze blurs, histories
collapse, and like a fish mouthing
toward light my future splits
into a forward-reaching Y,
two bodies of water,
lover, not mother.
I do not know
the seed planted
this day, nor the weight
of an unspoken agreement,
but leaving the shore, I stop
to pick up a stone—
dark as a womb, light as a dream.
*
Leslie St. John is a poet with Arkansas roots and California wings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Apersus Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Linebreak, Oxford American, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, and Verse Daily. She is author of Beauty Like a Rope (Word Palace Press) and Art of Letting Go, a freelens photopoem. Connect with her at proseandposes.com.