Self portrait, future self included

by Masin Persina

[ poetry - july 10 ]

Always, I’m at the center of an immense eye.
Sometimes I’m its pupil, while at other times
I am one of those floaters the eye sees
while staring at a blank, blue sky.
This morning, it rained.
Also, I rode a train to substitute at a school
for which I was paid enough to write this poem.
I do not recall the grade of light
or a single thought I held.
This evening, under some loose change of stars,
all the city’s windows are speckled with water stains
and I’ve lived with Ally six months.
Some days we’re happy with our very little.
Other days, we are sad.
Tonight, it is sadness, so I tell her, “Someday,
all of this will look so funny to us.
We will eat calamari, not sweat the bill
and look back through our Ray Bans
and laugh at how small we now seem,
how out of context our troubles, like two squirrels,
on tiny water skis, being pulled across a pool.”

When he met her it was as if he could see
his poems moving around below her skin
like fish in an aquarium. To attract them
he tapped the glass of the tank –
some were pretty big fish. They loomed
close, shadowing her face like a birthmark.
He saw their luminous scales, the frills
of their fins, their mouths, fat and defenceless,
without natural predators, begging
to be caught, mounted and nailed to the wall.

by sam riviere

When You Are Old
by W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

(photo credit: Irish History Links)

100th birthday.  And you can celebrate by donating to help clean up a little tiny oil spill.