Three Poems by Hannah Bonner

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A PASSING

Even now, the extraordinary
silence of two years past – blue and pine.
The deep meadow presses down the dark
that can’t come quick enough,
wheat grinds to its knees.
The moon’s technical presence
does not disappoint tonight,
her usual rise and fall through horse
and yearning. And your voice – like those stars
made immutable by their very stillness –
a singular heat burning,
your absence again restored.

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INFIDELITY

That night you left to buy a quart of milk
the snow fell still. Blue pines iced in shadow
released a whinny with the needled wind
whose mapled movement our curtains echoed.
Your absence roots the logic of my heart-
less conjecture (the errand’s purpose clear)
since often I wait, blanketed in dark,
the buffed, black studded buckle of your heel
a punctuation to someone else’s clock.
Against the beating of my breath I steel –
you stop. I listen close again. Tick tock.
A caesura that, to my ear, rings false,
suggests that nothing really disappears,
her scent, your errancy, emblazoned here. 

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MATERIAL DIALECTICS

for Matt

It finally feels like fall. The gingko is sunny
side up. The sky is lush with rain. On the walk
to work the jack hammers tat tat tat, clattering
in my cavity like a skull. Mud seeps over littered sidewalks,
and I almost slip in my slip of a shoe, almost miss
the mess of flowers, uprooted on the curb, keep close
to the fence that quivers, alongside me, in the cold.
Last night we watched a film series on 16 mm about rural
and urban landscapes. The director spoke about the film’s
flecked grain – how precious it is to handle in her hands.
This preoccupation with the material is meaningless
you told me afterward, not touching, and the clouds
heaved, and soon we were drenched in rain thick as static, low-frequency.
So often you speak to me, and I don’t even hear you.
You won’t repeat it. You won’t repeat it.
But when you press against my ass, finally home,
my body knows what to do in an instant,
like light, reckless through celluloid:
raucous, this whole image.