08.19.2023
Proposal Poems for Basia
Budding
Despite two nonchalant hellos
two intrigued seeds sprout
and immediately intertwine
Never have two beings felt so novel to the other
while simultaneously so familiar
Life has only just begun!
An origin so sweet
it’s still outlined on our tongues
Tastes of Wednesdays
and Franny’s
and just the right amount of mayo
with a smile and nervous belly from behind the counter
a delicious silhouette
that pairs with $7 porch wine
and Tjaden kisses and kocham cię
and texts that make heartbeats scatter
across the floors of
too-small rooms
and stale kitchens
and underneath locked doors
that shelter two little shoots
drinking each other up
and down
becoming
one magic flavor,
the bud of a home.
Growth and Renewal
Roots pressing,
a new bed is made
in the city that never sleeps before it
breathes in a musky soup
that somehow makes you cough up cash
enough for the martini
but not for the nicer cut of meat
Two little ones, calling themselves grown!
Their sweetness is a blanket
that wraps around too-long days
and subway shoes
that run away from street-punchers
both on the Wall and by the road
It still holds the reverb of a boxed wine cheers
and ash-filled bowls
and heads so close together
veins scribe their own wistful tune
about a place where blooming is possible
within a hardness like this
But even the strongest of perennials lose their petals come fall
and in winter, a sickness takes hold
Upheaved, scrubbed clean and replanted
into a suburban pod of six
Where sustenance subsists
in salmon paté and creaky beds and woods walks
alongside whispers of fragility
in death tolls and an empty head with orange skin
52 weeks
Never have these two beings better understood
that breath is not to be wasted
and words are better left said
only when the tongue’s touch is soft
In stillness,
roots can learn to be patient
and fear unravels
weaving two tighter together than before.
Flourishing
Wetted, smoothed and
nourished by two hands held,
their soil is sculpted into a teak-sanded home
with corner kisses
and pressed cheeks
and colored calendar weeks
where across hundreds of sleeps
breaths bridge worries with
wishes and sorrows with
sillies and downers with
“deeper”
by the brick-and-light-speckled sea
A landscape!
Of jellyfish blooms
and love-fifteen
and salmon sashimi paired with
jazz and canon-fires
that echo across this new earth,
stained sweet with sparrow visits
and tinned cockles
and one-too-many mezcals,
chased with bellies up on the lake at sunset,
water so cold you just have to be alive
When a stalk grows high enough
it can go on forever
Never have two beings known a flourish so vast -
the whole universe is somehow smaller
than this thing we share.