Distinction

I thread my way among the crowds
Distinct, apart, differentiated
By wind and wisdom
Lifting my skirt
Raising the tide.

Connections surface everywhere.
The pull of distant nuance
Arrests me in mid-stride,
Stops my frontal assault
For a brief, sweet sad moment.

You are hidden in me
Even when I forget your name,
Erase the visage once jealously guarded
From slight or suggestion
Of anything short of forever.

But none of us can make good
On offers of abiding devotion.
Unabated passion thrives only in fiction
Not in the lives of two brooding
Overburdened everyday legends.

I want to be a child again
And feel the pure delight of morning
Without a heavy measure of obligation
And responsibility to leaden
My perfect moment.

I want to be in your arms
Safe and sure
Held close like a baby
Kissed on the brow
At nightfall and at daybreak.

I want to be in a faraway land
Holding your faraway hand.

Teresa Currier's Questions:

1.  Who is hidden inside the narrator--a lover, a child, her innocence, a spiritual figure?  Are these multiple possibilities plausible?

2.  Is redemption possible for the narrator, or has she left her grand passion behind her, a chapter not to be repeated?

3.  Can anyone ever truly recover from abiding, limitless love?

Prayer

The evening surrounds me
And minimizes daily catastrophes
Stars outshine insults
The deepest blue indigo
Exceeds my endless need.

On nights like this I require nothing
More than breath and thought
To nurture me forever.
Heed these moments, store them
For the long cold winter sure to come.

Perfect harmony needs no complement,
No witness to record 
Its still, steady, undulating girth.
Enfold me, now, in your blue oblivion
Encase me in crystal clear truth.

I want to savor these sweet blessings
Before departing, earthward, stolid
Before my waking day's begun
Allow me, please, one full swift vision
Before my terran race is run.

This moment passes, now, forever
Gone for want of nothing else
I strive to hold it to me, nearer
To cleanse me and to call it self.

I pray for another radiant evening.
I pray for another day.
I pray for richness unaltered.
I pray for breath to pray.

Teresa Currier's Questions:

1.  Is the transition from prose to rhyme effective or distracting?

2.  What is meant by the line "to cleanse me and to call it self"?  Is it confusing?  Should it be reframed?

3.  Does this poem convey quiet confident hope or saddness and pain, or something in between?

Touch

What prompts me from my docile sleep
Urgent, insistent
With tremor and passion?

Loving touch
Lingers on skin and cerebellum
Formed and inchoate
Fondling my dreams.

Passion silent but persistent
Evokes remembered edge and answer
Rising, falling,
On and upward
Now arrived.

Your skin song and gentle pageant
Long away and far aside
Poignant, tragic
Clear and fragile
Gone in moment, not in mind.

What wakes me now
Your actual touch, fervent and near
Or your memory,
Concrete and seared?

Teresa Currier's Questions:

1.   What is meant by "remembered edge and answer."?

2.   Which touch was it, the actual one or the memory?

3.   Is this poem accessible to you?  Or is it too oblique and sparse?

Thanks for considering my poems.