"Yet"

I sit down to eat a meal

but I am not hungry.

I am lonely,

so I tread down to the river

and lay on the grass,

feed on the sun

and the lapping water.

The seagulls overhead,

search for something

in wide, white arcs.

I wish I was Whitman

with his stomping leather boots and open shirt,

making love to my own soul on the grass.

So I take off my sandals, try in vain

to avoid duck shit

and feel the tender, giving earth

beneath my soles.

Sieze the grass in my fists

as if it were the wild hair of my lover

and wait.

But I do not love my soul yet.

I look up to the trees,

boughs thrust towards one another.

Bleed in seamless, lilac shadows.

Leaves pursue the rippled water,

consoled by their own reflection.

Out of the mute dark

they labor the whiteness of roots

into a new century.

Allow themselves to be hollowed out

by disease and lovemaking

in order to bear the silence.

Whitman makes me wonder

if he was able to love just one woman.

He craved

everyone and everything

and every portion

as if he were God himself.

My plight roots me here.

But I do love the world,

this grass, my river,

the fat, full ducks

who refuse my bread.

Written by K.

5/29/09