Loose Sonnet with Uncertain Tracks
A day you imagine you’ve taken up the cello.
Wide burnished curves between your legs, wood
like satin. Surprised by skilled fingers plucking
strings and your arm arcing the bow, long-time
lover. Intimacy of released sound, not inside,
not outside, the juncture. You’ve never touched
a cello but feel this as sure as if you’d stirred
a past-life. Or an unknown ancestor surfaced—
her flat in nineteenth-century Berlin trembling
with lost sonatas. Like the day you waded
in woodland water, watched idle leaves spin
their dreams and felt someone nearby. A cave,
sacred fire, urge to gather willow sticks, green herby
things, cochineal berries. No clue what or why.
Wide burnished curves between your legs, wood
like satin. Surprised by skilled fingers plucking
strings and your arm arcing the bow, long-time
lover. Intimacy of released sound, not inside,
not outside, the juncture. You’ve never touched
a cello but feel this as sure as if you’d stirred
a past-life. Or an unknown ancestor surfaced—
her flat in nineteenth-century Berlin trembling
with lost sonatas. Like the day you waded
in woodland water, watched idle leaves spin
their dreams and felt someone nearby. A cave,
sacred fire, urge to gather willow sticks, green herby
things, cochineal berries. No clue what or why.
Beverly Burch’s third poetry collection, Latter Days of Eve won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize. Other work has won the Lambda Literary Award, the Gival Poetry Prize and been a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Poetry and fiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Cortland Review, New England Review, Catamaran, Willow Springs, Salamander, Tinderbox, Mudlark, Barrow Street and Poetry Northwest.
Art: Molly Dunham