April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”

A tactile poem of love from the 1985 volume Early Light by W. S. Di Piero, now most easily found in his selected poems, Chinese Apples.

In Our Room

On the strip between the lakes
I look for some trace of you
in everything that moves.
At the tip of its wake, a coot’s
bone bill points through
the leaves’ sponged-ink shade,
slate feathers splitting the air;
the water quivers, bright
as your bath-drenched hair
shaking off silvered bits.
A tern pulls up, tilting
through the spreading light,
then drops beak and body fast.
Two dark swifts dip past
swamp oaks like brown
twilight in our room, blinds
barring your face, while your lips
closed on some dream sound,
some word I didn’t catch,
a wood-duck’s straight-seamed wedge,
a cowbird shuddering from
the lake on loose bent wings.

Read more from Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems