Three Poems

Maxine Chernoff

Solstice

In certain dark
the moon issues this request:

to be the shadow on the pillow,
the glass candle near the door of sleep.

A hungry Stellar’s jay breaks berries into pulp,
while bats decorate the rafters, and

the wood pile moans under
its burden of fog.

As life encroaches on the dreaming
bedpost, you remember

a chip of ice you found in river
sludge, its sheen a mute witness

to increments of change
as lens and pure belief.

The Exercise

1.
unmoved
by will/choked by sun &
vessels holding water,
under gray adjectives

2.
lion of letters loop of lilies
the bird that swallowed
the cat
circadian sway
of science, its mirrors,
its cyphers,
a sand crab
tossed in a porcelain bowl

3.
remember what sins
you commit
then write shell, that which contains
a softer self

4.
stories hold the brackish
understory
the letters of refusal
(But fire will spread/despite your inclinations)

5.
In brine, a harvest of krill
his never spent notion : to be a water farmer
knee-deep in thistle

6.
He took his cure; mixed love with
blandishments:
checked his mortality at the door

7.
stayed to read the candled letter,
the windswept book of
resolves

8.
Who will outlast this life
Noun + seven
we perform the exercise
often we blush
at the strangeness of engines

Leaf 

Nascent in leaf, splurge
of water marks the season’s
start, the flecked eggs found
under an ivy-facing frame.
Morning’s music is cellos
and the warp and weft
of waves curving
under the bridge where
once you stood and tied your
losses like a rope of stones.
When scenes were ended,
their blueness still supreme
reminder that we hold
our longing, abjure
the simpler premise of a swerve
in luck or fate. Summer’s
baggage shows up at our door,
the lesser leaves give way
to green’s inherent richness,
filling in the trumpet vine,
the Daphne stem, whose leaf
is hidden under hearty growth.
In hiding we may find
our only voice or one true word.