July Afternoon
Alison Luterman
July Afternoon
Not the love-making, but the afterglow. The ebb.
Clean sheets on the bed, breeze stirring the curtains.
Not the bliss, but delicious rest, when we’re two canoes
moored to the same dock, bobbing in gentle backwash,
you drifting out to dream, me resisting slumber
because I don’t want to miss
even a moment of this,
your long warm limbs touching mine,
hip to hip to thigh all up and down the length
of us. And what if we’re already dead (I whisper,
knowing you won’t hear). What if it’s been a thousand years
by now, our house long gone to dust, and this spot
where we’re lying is a meadow again,
dotted all over with tiny purple flowers?
Alison Luterman’s four books of poems include The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo; and In the Time of Great Fires. She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, Main Street rag, among others. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Five of her personal essays have been collected in the e-book Feral City.