The Eye Is Collapsing by LB Thompson

rain unpeels from wheels or treads

ominous pause before wind begins

 

tell me, how could love be any different

bodily love at some precipice

 

when the holding is stronger

than the flourish of release

 

            outside, the wind over and over shows

            the pale undersides of maple leaves

 

the release, not the holding means

but this is a palpable bonding that refuses to fuse

 

separation is a more conscious choice

first one, then the other loses interest

 

            venerable maple trunk squeezed by rain shined ivy vines

            downed limbs cracked, softened nearly to pulp

 

features praised now fade

the freckle on the stretched neck

 

that wanted kissing and was kissed

now assimilates in a night wash

 

            even the ivy lets go

            its whisker claws unclench the bark

 

even the nodes pinched

into life a moment ago

 

do not shine out

possible to see morning’s blurred blue

 

            the electricity does not thrum

            the clocks have nothing to say

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LB Thompson has won awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Southampton Review, Art in America, and Stonecutter among other print and online journals. She also has poems in the anthologies IOU: Anthology About Currency, Still Against War VI, and the forthcoming anthology from The Writer’s Foundry. Thompson collaborates with visual artist Ellen Wiener, with whom she recently exhibited a poem sequence at Vanderbilt University and through a public art program at Long Island MacArthur airport in Islip, New York. She teaches at The New School/Parsons, and Suffolk County Community College. Please visit lbthompson.com for more on Thompson’s poems and collaborations.