The Boat

I am a bone - thin syllable
wife - nothing else.

I wait to hear
loving, patient, or beautiful
precede the role

but he saves those sweet endearments
for the boat,
not as words but as ways
of handling her.

He loves the wooden bow
sliding pelvis-smooth
in legs of wind
that carry her along
the river's course.

He takes her out
several times a week
and sleeps in a lap
cushioned with velour,
scented with cedar.

Moonlight falls
over the water
as she bathes
in cool silver,

and the shadow of trees
rippling beneath her body
in the same way
my hair
used to ripple beneath his.

I can still see David's eyes
shining under crescent lids
drawing my love
into a smile he touched
with fingers blistered

from working in the garden,
building a summerhouse
out of antique iron
and slate tiles.

He made a place for us
then retreated
to one of his own.

These summer evenings
I sit in the yard
wearing twilight
like a widow's veil,

constantly asking
why.

Mistress

Even the shade is warm
as leaves press
on the sun's collar bone
feeling the pulse
of summer return.

Some call it the breath
of India
moving in muslin-white skirts
and tracing red pockets
of sumac and fern.

Our mother remembers
this phase of Autumn.

She wore the smooth heat
of morning and slid her hands
inside the scarlet coat
of a lover. Fingers touched
rungs of bone and the coolness
of a golden ring.

She longed to climb
his ladder of dreams
and float within
the moon's rim of metallic glass.

Having sipped the poet's wine,
she wanted her flesh
turned into words
and kept between his lips
like a psalm he might sing

in the dusk-shorn light
of evening,

in hours
before Death creased
the saddle's leather

and spun the bugle's shine
into the high,
sand drifts of war.

Wendy Howe was formally trained as an English teacher
and presently runs her own computer business in Wallkill,
New York. Poetry has been a significant part of
her life since she was a child. Writing is as
essential to her being as breathing air. She is inspired
by life; its nature, people and history. In the last
few years, her work has appeared in a variety of
on-line and in-print publications.