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THREE POEMS
by David Simpson


My Favorite Silk Shirt

I'd love to say that its left sleeve (it's a long-sleeved shirt)
and its right breast are green: a deep, blue-green,
the way I imagine the sea must look,
salty and resilient enough to hold me on its belly,
expansive, and inviting, like the biggest bed
(though I've never seen green or the sea),
and that the right arm and the left breast are as blue as a sky
with a sun in it, and birds, and clouds, and maybe one of those little droning planes
my brother and I used to hear when we were four, swinging on swings in our backyard,
certain we were being taken care of by our parents and by God
(although I somehow lost track of him a long time ago).

But I'm only guessing about the colors in the shirt,
since I've forgotten what someone told me when I bought it years ago.
It might be orange and more of a pinkish something, for all I know.
Maybe I just like wearing the sea and the sky.
But, I am sure of the pattern: right arm and left breast one color,
left arm and right breast another color,
because as soon as I heard that, I felt it in my body.
It's what I love about the shirt (besides making it blue and deep green):
two people embracing each other around me,
or just stitched together by a marriage of arrangement--I can't be sure--
it's just that I like thinking of them as happy together--

I wore it last Saturday night with a pair of clean, fresh jeans
to read a few poems with my brother at a cafe in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
and then to a party afterward that my friend Wendy threw for us.
I didn't notice the large hole in the right elbow until the next morning
when I put it on again, groggy from too little sleep and maybe a little too
much to drink.
Definitely beyond repair--I knew it immediately--
I showed it to my brother, I showed it to Wendy.
I don't know why I'm keeping it,
except that I feel bad for the two lovers, and the tear in their sky,
and I'm afraid that it's likely that it's over for them,
and that their marriage, which seemed to be easily droning along
will just tumble, one day, out of sight through the hole:

Gravity

We were lying naked on the bed
when my conscience walked in. "Jesus, man,
with her a minor and her dad right down the hall what
the hell could you be thinking?"
I was thinking
of the way she kissed, like Jenny,
and how she clung to my neck, shuddering
and calling out for Buddy,
as if she were still falling with him
through the ice two years ago
and I was wondering
what I'd tell my wife
when I called home (if anything)
about our covenant
I let slip through my wet fingers
like a piece of our Limoge,
its shards glistening everywhere, underfoot.


Melting Under the Influence of Gravity

Beneath the grasses, wet at dawn,
Beneath the resting places of the dead,
Beneath sialic igneous
And sediment,
Beneath gabbro and basalt, two
Darker brothers near the ocean floor,
Beneath the Moho
And the mantle,
There is a weak Asthenosphere
Whose shifts and grinds and tilts
Topple cities overhead.
And farther down, a fiery furnace,
And molten lakes, no place to stand.

When the bough broke
I learned to play
Everything backward, to listen
More for quarter rests than quarter notes.
The spring grass cows feed on
sours the milk.
The elliptical tick of my heart
Comes from a pebble that, somehow, fell into it.