Cambridge Book Review

[Issue #16, Spring 2009]

Two Postcards to Sylvia

Sarah Busse

1.

I rise quietly to work in the still-dark dawn.
Like you. I do not love easily or well. Ardor
is a different matter.

Years ago in a dream the grass spoke to me,
saying You must find an
other way. Minus extremity's rigid torque.

I am walking that way now, though I know
the moon desires her own devoted, grown
to reflect the shattered brilliance of the eye's round.

2.

I tell you this shard of a dream to hold myself
by your ear, to keep from falling to the mud:
You, a white giant frozen

mid-stride into momentary flares of a storm.
Me, a tree-frog climbing, sticky-toed and soft,
up your marble thigh, along an arm. You were

not perfected. No, terribly not perfected.
Interrupted, there in the freezing mud.
Glaring into light that soaks us both.

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Sarah Busse has published poems in various journals and magazines, including most recently the magazine Poet Lore, the broadzine Arbor Vitae, and the online journal, Mezzo Cammin. The co-editor of the Wisconsin poetry magazine Free Verse, she lives with her husband and two children in Madison, Wisconsin. You can find her online at bookthatpoet.com.
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