Caesura
To liken it to pregnancy
is to deny the differences
between what is and is not said,
but in the rest between the last and next,
a silent word is born in the imagination,
cannot survive the pause,
and dies alone.
He looks to where her eyes might misdirect.
Perhaps he hopes to find the frightened child
he hopes to save,
he hopes to rescue
from the hollowness between them.
She is reflecting on the stillness
of the surface of the wine
that lies as featureless
within the half-filled glass
as emptiness itself.
Insects
Insects sift scant light
into this dense summer heat.
I sweat like some blond Mexican laborer
drinking a wine from California,
my warm blood making mosquitoes drowsy,
while fireflies drift like glowing ash
on the draft of a dying flame.
I held them in my hand as a child
reading their message, chanting aloud,
“Oh, grant us peace this warm night.”
They beckon to attract a mate,
but as a child I did not know that,
believing they had flown too near the moon.
“Denise,” I whisper, sitting alone,
the lines of kiting spiderlings adrift across my lips,
imagining small creatures hunting in the night,
springing traps,
running each other to the ground,
calling, their bodies’ lamps burned cold,
“we are surrounded by hunger and loneliness,”
knowing that words are worthless,
recalling a firefly pinched in half,
flickering rhythmically, oblivious to his death.
David Schnare is a retired house painter, dishwasher, used car reconditioner, cathode ray tube assembler, warehouse clerk, hospital orderly, and general practice physician. Aside from single poems in Better Than Starbucks and The Ekphrastic Review, he has no publications.