Charles F. Thielman
Eugene
Her son’s tight-roped breath fogs zig-zag down to the shore
as he igloos into the ice heart of a storm’s approach,
the lake’s thick ice groaning.
Butterfly tattoo near her jugular, she paces the ridge, watching.
So like his distant father, she’s determined he’ll not absorb their angers.
Dragging her bag of assorted echoes,
she recalls a rain of touches building into layers of liquid heat, recalls
how a waxing moon snipered
a magnetic line between drapes.
His laugh arcs up from shoreline birch.
She inhales an eclipse nightly, love’s initials carved in the driftwood of time lost.
Her son’s hazel eyes still follow the veined wave-crests of dreams,
his skin luminous.