What? Who?

Here’s more.

I can’t remember ever writing a villanelle before. The first line, “I’m having an affair with my wife in sleep” was with me all day. Later I went to see Peter Sears read – he shared a villanelle and I wanted to try the form. The result is below.

AFFAIR WITH MY WIFE

I’m having an affair with my wife in sleep.
She knows. She doesn’t care.
Unsure who’s there across the sheets.

I grasp straight from a dream
of rising too quick for air.
I’m having an affair with my wife in sleep.

It’s not anything too deep.
I just shoot up like a flare.
Unsure who’s there across the sheets.

My mind lags as hands reach
to her skin, pink and bare.
I’m having an affair with my wife in sleep,

who whispers the promise we keep
as I whisk her hair.
Unsure who’s there across the sheets.

No light, just sounds that seep
as our parts begin to pair.
I’m having an affair with my wife in sleep.
Unsure who’s there across the sheets.

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(NOTE: Thanks to ReadWritePoem for prompting some rhyming fun this week.)

There’s a sink where I eat sometimes. There’s a window above the sink where I watch birds. There are phone wires where the birds sit sometimes, and there are other places too. The piece below is fairly rough – a first draft in fact. I hope you don’t mind me sharing.

OUTSIDE

(Upon standing at the kitchen window)

At first it takes my eyes and mind a minute
to agree on what they’re seeing,
because none of us, me or them
have ever seen birds bathing in the gutters
of a pitched roof before. Building a nest –
sure. Dive-bombing into the slippery
morning grass. Perched on wires
outside my house, singing blindly tucked
into the currant tree out back. We’ve seen
these things, this brain that can paint
the scene without thinking, eyes that
in a blink can reconstruct such thoughts.
But bathing in the squared-off white gutters
on my neighbor’s new roof – shaking their wings
as a dog would its fur, running up and down
the pitch like children from knoll to spring?
Four of them, then five, then a sixth – if you
could imagine smiles on beaks, if any of us
were close enough to see what they thought,
I know they wouldn’t be wondering why
they hadn’t done this before but thanking
some bird god they were doing it now.

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