Chanterelles

by Bill Rasmovicz

Their birth is slow and dark, more mysterious
than the body’s.
A precipitation upward through the yellow hue of
some elemental industry.

For them I set to the rain a stern pace.
How will we collect the mosquitoes?
Were her ovaries suspended in her torso like streetlights
the storm knocked out?

Last night’s questions beamed with the celestial pitch
of a star in a cigar box.
The aphid sap-sucked the field. Butterflies
swarmed heaps of what the horse dropped.

We are lonely and desperate creatures seeking it as easy.
We wish to be loved now when we could
remain intimates forever.

In how many waiting rooms did the magazine despot’s
eyes peer softly, and tobacco brown?

There should be a place we could all swim naked in
the lake, forget what the hound’s tooth forecasted.

When I saw the boy with gray hair, the park squirrels
were weighably less enthusiastic, the birches
in their sidewalk patches of peat, bleak and leafless.

We were landslides to each other.
There was no time for connoisseurship.
The dusky seaside sparrow was no longer,

and often times we pulled over to pupate from
this vista or that.
Evening your favorite color, I kept imagining

the ceiling painted gold, while the beach we fetishized
was a pile of hot sawdust.
Strictly for the sun’s burn did we reside.
You were the animal they warned you about.

Click here to read “The Loveliest Cities” by Bill Rasmovicz

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