September Solitaire
There are always added difficulties: unwashed glasses,
the box with some sweaters, the floral arrangement
in the kitchen, the kitchen floor. It was a grid
of pale blue and gray linoleum; it no longer exists.
All of us move in time for winter.
Things are most dangerous when habits are kicked;
birds, and the way you imagine.
We tell stories.
This to restrain the sense that we would give in
too easily when the time came. The time had come.
The first red and the first green are not the same;
between death and birth are radical colors,
of which the trees are stain. I told stories for hours,
each made from imminent, rendered places; talk itself
a terrain. I recall games: ducking and kisses and tails.
Someone is always blinded. Someone was removed in a chair.
Ann Lauterbach is a native New Yorker. She has just compiled her first collection of poems, titled Chalk.