Measures

A poem. "...this dark, divested glass"

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I

I empty a certain measure of myself
into the snifter, bright glass
that hoops and throws the liquor’s
faun-brown, comfortable light.

“Each night, they seek only
to drain the cup of oblivion.”
This is both more
and less than that,

as the snow outside
decks still branches
with their ghosts, and I begin
to speak with mine.

II

for Rashad

All windows open,
we angled glass like canvas
and caught the stiff light
of the long afternoon.

Breezy, immortal,
plucking a bottle
from its stow in the guitar case
and dolling out its sun-licked amber.

I can’t recall
if your bemused, self-mocking
smile fell into frame
as you ambled by,

smelling the tang of whisky
unfurl from our ground-floor suite,
what word of warning, taste,
or laughter you passed on.

Now you’re adrift somewhere
more distant, a six-by-two skiff
beating along the uncharted.
And the cup I tip for you is only salt, salt, salt.

III

for Ben

Always the sting of loss
attending on life’s vividness.
The day we met, I said
that bourbon was bottled summer heat.

That drinking it transported us
to a Carolina road lined with raspberry
and vining creepers, to the swell
of cricket song thumping like a banjo’s pulse.

I thought of that years later
when there was nothing left to say,
when the twins were gone and we emptied
our two tumblers of their gold in silence.

IV

How easy to compare it
to something dug from under earth,
sparkling and hard-won,
both luminous and numinous.

Wedding-ring gold
or Baltic amber, glisten of lamplight
on a heave of the Adriatic, warmed silver
that rises and sinks on a woman’s chest.

Less easy to find analogies
for time’s cutting losses,
like flavor vanished from the tongue
after a long pull’s invigorating sting.

Aqua Vitae, panis quotidianus,
the lightness it imparts departs like the days,
like the flames of daylilies
winking out from June roadsides,

and what I’m left with
is this dark, divested glass
through which the room
now seems empty and inexplicable.

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