Three Poems
Lauren Coss
Eve
I have sat with green-eyed Eve
Drinking coffee so black—
It would make a Norseman start.
We have shared the same gray table,
Four wooden legs in a dim room.
I have felt the green snake of jealousy curl up tight—
Small in my belly—
Stay there.
Wicked Eve hears the whispers of all things green and slimy
And when they talk, reminds me to listen.
She draws my eyes beyond the garden wall
To dream of long roads on a cool afternoon—
For I too have wanted to see the little world
And to know the patches of the sky.
Because a corduroy landscape was not enough,
We yearned to know the red romance of an apple—
A taste of gravel and September rain—
And though we fell far and woke up alone,
We were not sorry.
Delilah
She leads him in from the winter calm
Of a chill, honest December
She steals his strength with an earnest whisper.
The cold is sharp,
But she feels nothing
When her wicked words—crack—
Ice beneath a hot rain.
Still, he loves her like a little downfall
And follows her up twelve wooden stairs.
In that jealous room she lays him down—
Traces his fair curls with a scarlet nail
While the soft snow falls in murmurs
Framed in a window’s amber glow.
He sleeps
Through the slash of scissors—
The silver sounds—
The flash of frosty metal.
When in a hazy moment,
All seven locks lay scattered,
Her silhouette stings his eyes.
Then nothing—
And the world turns gray.
Bathsheba
“Yes the silent stars frost her skin,
But, while kingdoms rise and fall—
You burn.”
Yet he shuts his eyes and dreams Bathsheba and
When he prays he breathes her name and when
January tumbles fast and cold
He knows hunger.
He remembers that summer,
How her dark hair spilled
Wraithlike down her spine,
How the cool moonlight
Filled the creases and folds of her ivory skin,
While the water caressed her body,
While the world lay prostrate at her feet,
And the summer air was black and thick,
Stirring through the tall pines and silver birches.
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