From the chapbook Captured, a Pteranodon chapbook published by Lieb-Schott Publications.
Copyright 1983 by Patricia Lieb. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following publications where the collection of poems in Captured first appeared:
Affinities: The South Florida Poetry Review, for Shadows and The Deep: Sirens; Anthology of Florida Poets for Grave Digging (third printing), and Looking At You Through A Rain Covered Window Pane; Cedar Rock for Grave Digging and Waiting; Earthwise for Hurricane; The Florida Arts Gazette for Captured; Gryphon for Learning To Write A Poem; Indian Corn for Bathing In Red Wine Words; Pudding for Grave Digging (second printing); The Spoon River Quarterly for Dreaming Of Wheat; Tempest forThe Eagle And The Dove; and Xarier Review for Until Dawn.
Your eyes are greener than words
surrounding me like
buzzards preying on a dead wolf.
Your eyes
preying, calling out dark words,
words that come over me, burn my
insides like green whiskey
stolen in the night; the
last night without loneliness
without a net wrapping around my naked hips, my breast, pulling
my body to the other
world, where noothing is clearer
than smoke, than clouds,
wet and dissolving,
dissolving before my eyes--
my green, green eyes.
Our graves are there,
covered with dead-layers
of years and lovers.
Restless,
in the time-locked coffins,
folded hands
with unmatching bands,
pound
at each others' chest
Should the coffins crack,
just an inch,
our dust will whirl
into the sun.
I'll come again tomorrow
wringing my hands, like Mama's
laundry,
painting blue words,
like the bluing she put
in the water.
I'll come again, to this place
on the beach, and I'll take
the unsharpened pencil,
rub it, rub it
on a stone, until someday, like me,
it will be sharp
enough to fly.
