Michael Dwayne Smith- Two Poems

Across the Embarcadero

A red ferryboat turns on the bay.

Three gulls spin above it,

then pinwheel against glints of sky.

Wingless, we consider these spirals

magical, as alchemists might,

that like may conjure like,

that the heart, astonished

as it beholds this ascension from below,

may suddenly leap and bend upward.

Nestlings, our imagination precedes

evolution: We will fly, the curvity

of our desire blooming with feathers,

our weightless thoughts

gliding upward in the pure

oxygen of heaven, which also we have so

deeply imagined. Sails crest the water.

A flock of gulls turns to circle the pier,

wings fanning out against sea’s gravity.

Portrait, in Miniature

I think of you,

and the smallest breeze disperses you

like the leaves of an unbound novel.

I am unable to sweep up with my hands

what remains of you.

I think of you,

but you disappear by degrees everyday

like leaves beneath a falling snow.

I am undone by how increasingly hard it is

to see you at all.

The more I think of you, the more your face

fades to an intaglio of sorrow,

the more withered and veined we become.

I cannot retrieve you.

I see only this locket

portrait I’ve painted: winter’s twin bodies

in our bed, clothed, untouched,

uncomforted—neither sleeping

as night’s last howl and stir leaves us.

Michael Dwayne Smith is a California desert native and graduate of the creative writing program at U.C. Riverside. He's the poetry editor at Cease, Cows Literary Journal and has been a professor since long after the cows came home. His work appears in cool journals like burntdistrict, Word Riot, decomP, >kill author, Heavy Feather Review, Monkeybicycle, and The Cortland Review. Michael lives near a ghost town with his wife and rescued animals--follow him at http://michaeldwaynesmith.com