The Place where Love is Pure

My wife has written a book, and sometimes
I like to leave it closed,

with fingertips furrow the gold threads
till the soft weave of binding startles me

like a soul roused from sleep,
my heart in sudden motion.

Sometimes I leave it closed
as if in passing beyond,

I’d leave my shadow there.
Sometimes I pass my palm

over its gold romantic threads as if
when opened, its writing might disappear

the way it is with treasures:
a thief with velvet pouch will come,

or panning in the moonlight,
eyes watch us, brighter than the gold.

Then I touch the book and think
what if it were a winter temple

swept high with snow on all sides
and I climbed in doubt

but someone else took a path
more foolhardy, and reached nirvana!

At times I sail into the night
clinging to the cover like a star-mariner

hurtling through space in a darkness cold
and pricked by distant light.

I clutch that supple spine saying,
this is a place where love is pure,

the heart-moon flies above us
steering the riverlight

through a valley of otherwise
cold stone.

She has sucked the airy world of romance inside
and breathed out its clouds.

On her pages, the heart reaches
its true self.

I recall opening the library door
to find her reaching, her hair sliding

over Plato, Wilde, Michelangelo,
Baldwin, teasing those old queens

that she might read them next.
Then our reading eyes meet

and I pass into the ink,
a well where words rise womanly

like catbird notes when dusk
falls to drown my problems.

Sometimes she reads and her voice
spreads outward in rings,

her eyes in twilight,
her fingers alive in the turning.

Sonnet of the Leaves

An old dim bulb is all that the sun
has looked like since the day has begun,
The white of an egg and a blinded eye
Are all I have to see her by.

Again this year I have nothing left to do
but take the same long path of sift and spin
down to the roots where old life collects
in leaves like the black blood of rotting apricots.
I’ve worn their violet hats, their passion-plums,
scarlet strokes on butter yellow parchment,
the sun-stroke peaches, moon-fire dressing gowns.
Over my head still hang frog and pickle greens,
but down, the rust of harrows in a field,
brown smut of old gloves and pumpkins,
a load of copper bullion, ocean foam.
The tanning of drought-burned pears.
I hate the yellow fever of drying grass.
I have it for love, but the sky is white and heavy,
and the sun is a blinded eye, swirling with snow.

Tall Trees

I am such an old tree my roots have cracked.
So what? I’m tall enough for my leaves
To sweep the floor of heaven.

Let Your Beauty Change

Let your beauty always fade, my love,
Let crows dance up your neck frustratingly
Humanizing you, while strings above,
By which fate lifts your soul, lift your body
And drop it, and let your skin become papery
With ink from all the years’ calligraphy
To cover the marks others remember you by,
And let your well of love dry up, each eye
Cloud over like a lake, deep and cold.
Time will strip the leaf from your gold temple
And make instead a small, homey chapel
Under split trees, hollow and old.
Let your cracked bell call for companionship.
On your hard pews I’ll still worship.

Brad Bostian teaches writing at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte and is currently at work on a young adult science fiction novel. He is madly and passionately in love with Patricia Kennedy Bostian, mother of his two children. Click here to read Brad Bostian's reviews for ForPoetry.

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