It was really like that.
Autumn brown night washed
the avenues and we talked
of nothing important, just power
and pleasure and paradise. Nothing
was, but the slope of her nose
to that breath, that thumbprint dent
between nostril and lip. Lamb
white dawns hung before us
without pause.
And when morning did come,
we lay still, the nooks of our bodies
our landing points. Nothing
lacking in joy. Evergreen forests
went on and on to what
we could only imagine
was a tide or time that waited
for our knees to fall
into it, our nights to fill,
and the nothing
which was the perfect,
of our lives.
But as the current turned closer
by the moon that was ever rising,
time flapped its webbed wings
in the branches, till it neither
swooped nor cried but came,
of course. We were young
and stubborn with our joy.
Green and dying now, we rattle
the song of these chains and talk
in whispers of nothing.
Oliver Egger is a journalist, poet, and editor who currently lives in New Haven, Conn. He is a contributing writer at the Boston Globe and the Provincetown Independent, where he was a 2023 summer fellow.
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