The Poet Forgets

By Dick Altman

Your syllables   serenade of blades   macerate   serrate me   excavate    desecrate   delaminate    defenestrate me     until one day   your voice tiptoes into the room    as I tie my shoes for a walk at dusk    Did I do something wrong? you ask    words so yielding in their quiescence    I look up to see if it’s you speaking    not a stranger    Our forty-fifth Valentine’s you remind in barely a whisper  Did I do something wrong    that you didn’t write a poem?    Regret and loss weep off your tongue    in a language we inhabited in a distant past tense    Little of us rhymed then    and days fed on spare syllables of unspoken moments  Mindful of how you wield a scalpel of verbs   I gift you these sleight-of-hand words    materialized of air thin and fragile Inhale forgetfulness’ fragrance    Draw it in deeply    as if from petals of forgiveness

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, , The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, Sky Island Journal and others here and abroad.  A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.