Candice Stover

Briefly, Enough

this morning light trembled
through my lashes
as I drifted in and out
of sleep, cheek resting
on my love’s chest

I could follow every breath

a breeze passing over our bodies moved
like another breath, another
kind of breathing, until it seemed
we were drowsing on an open vessel
on a body of water we did not need to name

Balm

After the reunion’s excess
of company and champagne,

just the two of ease
the canoe into the pond.

September’s leaves light lamps
around us; we paddle

into gold suffusion as if
entering a ripe pear.

Our blades low, we lean
and listen—the surface insects

hectic, the cool still depths.
A pair of wood ducks squawks

away. The fruity air softens,
darkening, as one by one

the reeds extend themselves
exactly by reflection.

Living Where the Sun Still Sets

Once again the rim
of the earth is burning.
Clouds smolder then dark
begins, draping privacy
over every shape it finds here:
colony of boulders
in a field, tangle of oaks,
houses and machinery.

Even the leaves disappear.

Eleven thousand miles south,
not one leaf: only ice
and the history of ice
holding its own
in a season where the sun doesn’t set.

But here the pond has slipped
beneath a darker glisten.
Our neighbor’s windows shine.
I drop the blinds and turn back
to those pages recording
Shackleton’s last expedition:
frost-smoke, pacing
and Worsley taking observations
of the sun whenever possible . . .
on the march for a week, fearing
sunstroke even at two a.m. and then . . .
. . . no alternative
(Shackleton writes) but to camp
once more on the ice floe
and to possess our souls
with what patience we could . . .

The slow drift to evening
at another latitude . . .

Appointment

Not that it knows my name
or that I call it
any name at all—

pond, refuge, sanity, little jewel . . .

Not that it knows I approach it
summer mornings
like a lover

I undress for without hesitating—
sandals on the bank,
towel draping the branches,

welcoming even the sharp stones
it passes over
like certain betrayals . . .

how I lie on my side and let
the cool of its skin
brush my cheek, float

my body, this surface
where the loon also learns
how to cry for its species

and where stems of bladderwort rise
above the ugliness
of our name for it:

those delicate carnivores
I am not afraid to swim near
with their beautiful open mouths.