Saturday, January 14, 2006

dear salamander

the rain blanketed out the sun this morning,
and the stench of fresh brewed coffee
forced my stomach to churn and curdle.

i let my warm tea escape down the hollow drain,
and left myself without a warmth
for my fingers to wrap around.

i read all of your poems today.

and now i secretly hope that you'll call me
and read them all out loud to me;
but i know you don't know my number,
and i know you don't like phones
at least as much as i don't.

i can't cry at work, but i want to.
i want to stop reading, but i can't.

and i suddenly realize
that all the light in here isn't real.
and i'd forgotten
what it felt like to be hungry.

you force upon me some semblance
of a poetess--something worthy--
when, in truth, i am not really writing poetry anymore.
it's regurgitate fantasy ground to a pulpit
by my girlish will to keep secrets.

i encourage myself to squirm loose
from the embrace of a poet,
but my inner eye sees only
the red salamander.

it's still raining as i rub my temples
with two fingers of each hand
to focus my eyes on my hair,
my visual frame to the world.
i blur the picture for a briefest moment
before the phone rings

and it's not you.

5 comments:

katy said...

thank you enriko

Anonymous said...

hey katy. the poem is lovely. rain blanketed out the sun is a great start. the setting is a little unclear, it seems to shift between the third and fourth stanzas from a kitchen to your place of work. if this is an intentional jump, that works. if not, i'm not sure.

nice juxtaposition in stanza 6. artifical light and you don't remember what it's like to be hungry. that's really really good.

not sure about "a briefest moment". maybe "the briefest" or "a brief". but that could just be the english major in me. ground to a pulpit is great.

thanks for a great read!

katy said...

people make coffee and drink tea at work, i'm not the only one, right?

thank you mysterio for the comments.

i spent a while with "a briefest" and though grammatically it is not correct, read it outload, trip over it a bit, and see why i left it.

Anonymous said...

whoops. mysterio is jared from college.

katy said...

hi jared!