Eileen Walsh Duncan

Vagaries 

Cowl and cord slide from your red body.
Sleep rises from what is prone, fills the room.
Hands like spiders or starfish.
A grip that dissolves mist, portends breakage.
We didn’t know the journey involved solar winds.
The journey involved memory dysmorphia.
A generous ration of rain sculpted each utterance.
Sealed in a haven, in lengths of tree and dots of light.
Your leaving and coming back long-legged, with messages.
Birds at the window.
Mammals and stories gone restless to new territories.
The rate of return becomes glacial,
as it should.
But our skins still know each other.
My bones pestle and mortar, I ask to look up.
We drink in the star’s white flame, call it meaning.

Eileen Walsh Duncan’s work recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Swannanoa Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pleasure Boat Studio’s zine Lights, Ramblr Online, the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and the city of Shoreline’s Voices in the Forest installation. She received Seattle Review’s Bentley Award and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee.