The World Turning

The wall's paper wore Bordeaux flowers and malachite vines. It was thick and sturdy for years, though the woman staring at its decay had not been there to witness what kind of things the paper had seen:
the birth of a small boy
kettles boiling on a wood stove
a sleeping rocking chair; the world
turning.

Twenty years older than I had ever seen myself grow, the woman stood -- tall and glowing -- knowing those she loved had already faced darkness and died and gone on.

My hair the color of datura swelled bravely in the still. My eyes the same green ripened and shined the pansophy of foreseen eras.

The wall had become my barrier to the night and as it exhaled I inhaled:
musk of worn pages
lavender
desolation.

But then the wall peeled slowly the dwelling; it opened to the sea and night was not. My sky was now cradled in the soft electric perceived only after a gray and powerful storm. My feet ascended from the ash wood floor and for the first time in 24 years of slumber, I flew.
into the zenith
beyond the breakers
above the crests of rumination my conscious never reached
the tail of my white dress tasting the salty waters.


e. chayes

Things My Body Only Knows

Sit on my sill

dim and heavy
where vines sip thick mist.

lamp lights on the sunken road
lift lamented souls 

who yowl to pot holes
for their cavernous stutter
on the muddy path.

I cannot help but cry.

See my insides flutter,
feel my veins
whisper tunnels to my organs
and listen as my own descant
echoes and awakens
the swollen night.
 

e. chayes

the architect

In feathered blankets you, my vigilant,
mistake your eyes
for demons.

You who absorbs the arch of my bones,
who frames the shade of neon violet
to better sketch the bridge of freckles
no one else will see--
you are the builder,
the maker,
the pioneer.

In the aperture of your pupil,
I see not cerulean Styx
but Herculean blueprints for every waking hour
where you trace murmurs of my heavy breath
and turn them into art.

Before the sun has risen upon mortal follies
who have demolished spirits
and beg you, unknowingly,
to amend them, you are called to duty.

Hephaestus sanded your hands
to architect my heart valves, and I
like domicile vines,
climb slides from the pool to the scaffold
where you stand
sculpting stardust and salient tears.


for the one i love.
- e. chayes