Three Poems by Matt Friday



Note-fish

Glittering, bitter blue flames
-like desire, your fingers
spread and flare across my abdomen:
without doubt,
both angel and predicament.

At last the rain comes-
we sleep.    A constant stream
        wells out                  ocean, soil, sky…

Beside the sputtering candle
I wake         past midnight
          a chorus of frogs,
          the wooded shush
           -in a room grown suddenly small.

…Years gone, 
that midnight’s rush
          from which I cull like gliding fish
notes, some shimmering scrap
of what it’s been-

asking you send me back
something I can touch, 
something that, when touching,
swims. 





Spring

Something surreal, insistent
in the morning’s thin, pale light
after a storm-
I think of Nijinsky
his tableaux, gracefully constrained
the halting faun and gazelle
caught over and over again,
ears cocked, eyes focused through spring
and the meadow’s green blaze.
(Here, the dancer lifts both arms
bent at the elbows, in profile
steam rises-
in thin air
eggs form, glistening
around him)
and for a moment, 
I remember a boy
frozen before a stand of trees
a bright cluster of balloons 
beside him.





For Just a Moment, Now, There Is This
  
 to Jan

Finally it is living that is more heroic
than simply dying, giving in-
letting death have us 
as if only clothing, folded, 
consigned tidily to some drawer.

It is the choice to rise, ‘though beautifully
like the perishable moon
or dew hung tremulously in some leafy bower-

the drop will drop at last
it must
but we will not savage it
with impatient hurriedness
(no more slow the moon
by worry, dreamlessness
or absence).

In the fullness of some hour
curving outward in not-knowing
we quiver in a silver scythe of light

then drop 
a velvet, glistening brilliancy
at once both frozen here
and lost.

Matt Friday