blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

POETRY

T. R. HUMMER | For Dancers Only

Baby Won't You Please Come Home

Because the telephone can't ring, she ignores the pistol in the closet.
She stays away from the bottle of pills, refuses to walk over the bridge.
Moment to moment, she considers what time feels like, passing
In and out of the alveoli, around and through the aorta.
It has ground glass in it, the finest abrasive brume.
The gibbous moon lays a sharp quadrangle on her bedroom floor—
She studies its boundaries intently. Light here, dark there. Just so.
Perfect, as though God etched it with his carpenter's right angle.
The moon itself: off-center, busted, color of a half-healed scab.
God's hands are filthy. But that piano with its crystal riffs—
On the radio it sounds so clean it could almost be a life. 

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