Mezzaluna. Michele Leggott

us

      in the night wind where irises calibrate desire

      and the rhyme is a voice like sunlight?

honeybee

      Apex you’ll come to one fine morning

      set with that breakfast milk on the island steps

      a full feast of fresh air under your belt

      It’s a small island, turtle in the channel

      rare for the latitude, the islanders touchy

      about a fragile domestic economy Two

      of them bang away at an extension to the house

      dreamed up last night and being paid for

      in green dollars The Friday night pizzas

      are legendary if you know which boat to get

      and there on the rockface is the aretaloger’s sign

      sans me fatiguer ni de jour ni de nuit—

      a little dairy factory by the name of Isis Lactans

      pumping out soft cheeses of a truly divine nature

       9

      We could all go some more we could go down

      for it ourselves and come back on the Cream Run

      one quay at a time, mangos bagels wisdom

      from the markets where you lean on one elbow

      after making love and begin to make

      the universe dooby doux to a tune that suits

      your ripening sense of history

      Going out for the makings, staying in to eat

      mouth to mouth, why was it lost most

      when we needed that contagion in the telling?

      There is still the special place on her head

      where they touch her for more of the story

      while back in bed a sleep of hands and hearts

      is airing nectar in all the generous mouths

       10

      How beautiful in jandals, o prince’s daughter

      the motive bones of your finely dusted feet

      on the road to the cape and back

      many summers past small clips of paradise

      In the dark doorway the Fire Chief, a stir

      of silver buttons and a ceremonial axe

      as he walks into the picture again His are the gifts

      you are learning to take from the ballerina plate

      piled high between you in all of his houses

      Sometimes the regalia signifies, sometimes

      it’s just a couple of beers over lunch

      watching your seventeen-year-old self descend

      from the tree with the big nest of epiphytic lilies