The Shine Journal

 

Bill Trudo

Along the Ohio

 

 

Here they wander lunchtime with pizza boxes in hand, big city Louisville pizza.

Here they wander, wide-eyed foursomes, two boys and two girls, searching.

 

There’s a living in looking, in laughing, Tommy and Sue—see them;

and the river’s a raging drawl, so heavy with current below,

and the cars trip from one point to another or through.

 

The interstate streams with colors, the hotel lobby with faces;

the outlying counties all funnel their yellow charter buses here.

 

I don’t know what it’s like to grow in those small towns,

don’t know what it’s like to buy the house, mow the grass, and settle.

I’m wanting like these teenage eyes, all the world an infatuation,

and the tallest downtown merely tells tales to the sky.

Here drips the brightest water-rippled dream.

 

I know it ain’t perfect, better or worse.

I know there are dead branches in the river and not much sense in swimming murky water,

but every now and then I see an idle floating glaze along the surface

and feel a smile brush my face, and somewhere eyes do pierce.

 

There’s a living in all these raging drawls, in all these high-pitched squeals.

There’s a living in peach perfume and painted toenails.

There’s a living in floating even when the barges are pushed upstream.

 

 

About the Natural Between You and Me

 

 

I do know a language.

It is not in these lines,

but in my fingers’ feathery circles.

 

My quivering legs understand the semantics,

                                  best speak my anticipation.

 

My lips may part, shape a vowel,

                                    or meet yours.

My tongue remembers a compelling phrase—the tip of your tongue touching.

 

Even geometry drops its mathematical pretense,
evolves to your skin against mine,

me inside you—our native language.

 

These words, merely whole notes

in a less meaningful music,

a faint murmur of our intimate speech.

 

 

 

 

 

Daybreak

 

 

Let daybreak come.

Let it wax the streets with light.

Let it slip through bedroom curtains and rest on eyes,

 

open to dream,

         to the seal of a first kiss,

open to what night has tindered.

 

Let daybreak come.

Let it shred the vagaries of thought

      and pave sky—be it blue or sour cream clouds.

Let it come,

 

clear with sight

         with the merging of hands,

         those nimble nervous fingers twining words.

 

Let daybreak come.

Let it squeeze into cranies.

Let it swell with the most bombastic of presentation,

      a jester for the modern age,

laughed at, yet

 

      a glimmer as sleep departs from beds

      and feeling radiates in the adventure of touching

 

one slivering second,

one dance floor without music,

for the orchestration rescored, harmonized, and unleashed.

 

Let daybreak come.

Let it fill the rising breathes

      and saturate the bathroom’s steam.

 

One morning cleansed.

One morning complete

 

       with all that a toe can offer

                every shoe,

                every sidewalk and step,

       every foot which skips along the way bumped and tangled.

 

Let daybreak come.

Let it come gingerly.

Let it come thrashing.

Let it bathe the world in energy—and now

      let it be.

 

©Bill Trudo

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