I remember, when I run into you again,
balancing on the edge of the cracked sidewalk,
how much I wanted to like you
even more than I already did
all I hear is nothing you actually said –
everything else is street noise
© Sarah Whiteley
I don’t often write romance into my poetry these days. But in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’ll dust this one off. ❤
you speak of grasshoppers,
and fireflies, that sharp scent
of hard and sudden rains –
all the things that do not
set their blessings here,
or rarely do anyway
the impossibility of elsewhere
is no longer a vague notion –
the truth of it rests on my chest –
the spiny, black hull
of a horse chestnut dropped
on a damp and chill morning
© Sarah Whiteley
sometimes, between the long span
of months in which I do not
think of you at all,
I briefly consider calling you up
to ask you along for a hike
for a moment, not thinking how
having you there would so alter
the trail, that what lies before
would amount to steadfast avoidance
of what should be left behind
sometimes I consider calling you,
but let’s leave it there –
leave it as we would a sleeping bear
without the thaw of spring to shake
the old frosts from her fur
© Sarah Whiteley
for Charlie
routing earth for ants,
our quarry a queen,
it was as if the air
turned to petals
and buzzings of bees,
each of us sweet
and industrious
in the bright breaks
between rain
earlier, we’d paused
for the low darts
of the swallows
and the unexpectedness
of a dragonfly
the exact color
of a November sea
for now a small quest
and a glad yes
enough to bring us
shoulder to shoulder
in the tentative hope
of certainty and sorry
© Sarah Whiteley
it was as if all of every summer’s heat
had sunk into the worn boards of the porch
twenty years ago and I would do more
than simply sit beside you and tell tales
but here and twenty years backwards, I’ll admit
to seeing the lapsed possibility of home in you –
how the porchlight cradles your laughter
and not so much the door I can’t rush out of
without thinking if I’d only known you then
we would have been that much more
even in leaving, you’re all and everything
though everything arrives too late
even my feet, in finding their way away,
feel the impossible promise of you
© Sarah Whiteley
the question, always the same,
and the answer is that there are
so many blessed nowheres
she says she’ll have to find me
when I finally get that car,
when I finally succumb to go
she knows that I can write about birds
for only so long before I myself fly –
after so many years feeling
stuck and prayerless
the answer isn’t to find me
or to seek anything anywhere –
but if you begin to look for me,
try roundabouts nowhere
© Sarah Whiteley
in another version of this,
the forsythia didn’t forget
to bloom in its yellow dress,
a bright startlement
against the old red bricks
and in another version,
waking up beside you
would be almost ordinary –
the difference being the margin
between falling and fallen
© Sarah Whiteley
nothing with you has been enough
at 2 AM, to an audience of bricks,
I can be honest with my heart
and if I sit here long enough,
a prayer might stumble in –
something akin to what
moths find in porch-light –
I have been to-ing and fro-ing
with the consequences
but in the end, it comes to this:
we might love each other,
if only I’d forget to run
© Sarah Whiteley
one by one, when
you are most likely
to be unsuspecting,
I make them –
these petal-gestures,
trifling bright,
scraps with some
perhaps deeper meaning
one day – maybe –
you’ll be struck
by revelation,
with unexpected math
© Sarah Whiteley
no stars have come for us
no birds align in coded message
there is only us and all the ways
I say without saying
that I am both broken
and blooming, and uncertain
how to welcome hope and despair
on such unequal footing
© Sarah Whiteley
ebbtide 