COFFEEHOUSE POEMS
By
Troy Riser
MAGGIE @ 2
I take my daughter outside at dusk
As I do every night about now
So she can watch the stars come out, the moon,
Fixed in the spinning bowl of the sky
For her sake alone--so close, it seems like,
She reaches up to take them & keep them
In the cup of her ingenuous palm.
She splashes in the grass and waves at the trees
And I think my girl sees more than I can see
And that time has somehow jaded me.
I THINK OF YOU AS ALWAYS ABOUT NOW
On my back in the turgid night looking up
At the green plastic glow-in-the-dark stars
Glued to the ceiling for the sake of my kids,
Thinking, Only friends, just that, nothing more.
Knowing deep down where it counts it isn’t so:
Love is the grip of the heart in a fist,
The unrequited kind most cruelly held—
Afraid if I told you how I really feel
You’d equivocate (at first), embarrassed,
Then turn away, shake your head, say no.AN IMPRESSION OF KELLY
Quiet and serene,
Her soul sunlight reflecting
From a deep green pool.A POET WALKING
A poet walking,
Fingers gesticulating,
Counting syllables.BLOSSOMS
Pink snow of blossoms,
Blown from ancient dogwood trees,
Swirl in morning sunlight.ANGEL BABY (A Sonnet Written for Jerica at Her Mother’s Request)
Know that you will always be part of me
No matter how cruel the span of time
Or how distant the geography;
Know that our love is above any divide—
As the soul flies—straight to the heart:
The only true boundaries those we decide.
Know that our bond is more real than steel,
Harder by far and unbreakable;
And this mother-daughter connection we feel?
Enduring, understanding, unshakeable.
So know that nothing can ever break us apart
And it is this that stops the breaking of my heart.DIVERGENCE
At the sight of her?
Ground green Coca-Cola bottle glass poured into open eye sockets
Like buckshot poured down the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun.The sound of her voice?
The rubbing of balloons, the grinding of teeth, the popping of knuckles, the screeching of fingernails on chalkboard, the yowling of a cat in pain.Her presence in the same room?
Roiling stomach, clenching jaw, hands grasping, grasping,
Like a hangman dreaming of rope.How do I cope?
Neurons fire and collide with memories of a woman
With eyes like a piece of sky
And a body tasting of salt sweat and sexual musk
And a smile (charmingly crooked from a childhood fall)
That tripped the hammers of my heart
And ignited a desire it’s so hard to believe now I ever felt,
Could ever feel for this woman.And if that doesn’t work?
I take in the way our children look at her—
The way they look like her—
And let go the bitterness for a little while,
Resisting the urge to say something scathing and serpentine,
Like, “And how is my little adulteress?” Snakelike.
But I smile instead,
And ask how she’s doing,
Nodding in all of the appropriate places while she tells me,
Thinking, you know, this isn’t so bad,
She isn’t so bad.AMANDA MY HEART
Near to bursting when you enter the room:
The beating in the drum of my chest
Resonates down deep below the bone
To my soul somewhere in the marrow.The gold light of your eyes nearly blinding,
Forcing me to find my way by instinct,
A kind of love-seeking infrared
My body never knew about until now.Your touch the completion of connection,
Neon radiating and electric,
My spine become a Jacob’s Ladder,
Every nerve suddenly true north.Your mind quick (light years faster than mine),
Neurons firing and flaring incandescent,
But not so fast I cannot follow
Or anticipate the unspoken.(I know we’ve only just met so I hold back,
Slowing this rush of runaway emotion,
Telling myself, not just now,
Not just yet.)A MOTHER'S POEM
A rose not a rose & a book not a book
No matter how much like each they look
But symbols, say, of a mother’s love
And her unwavering faith in God above—
Her love no fragile, delicate flower,
Beauty of its petals its only power:
Its stem—graceful yes—but with corded strength,
Unyielding thorns running its durable length;
And her faith? No thing of paper and glue,
But the Source of what’s right, what’s good, what’s true.