Poems and Texts

from HOMELIT BEREAVEMENT: POEMS IN CONTRARY MOTION (After Philip Glass) by Prageeta Sharma

There Are No Last Sounds

The summer deck is filling with riotous rain
pouring down from your hands, I think.

I’m terrible at these supernatural images
and you wouldn’t like it if I kept it up.

But I know you are trying to water the plants,
and the seedlings and all of everything I might have neglected

for the last three months while I’m here fucking it all up. You
let me sit in my nightgown all day

while I type on the computer under heaps of shitty books.

You want me to move into something meaningful
and I know you are a function of whatever it is

because you gave me all the departing desires,
as a way of teaching me to cope and to stay a poet

when I don’t feel like being a poet, but now
the challenge is in how I put all this in me

in the way you’ve always presented me with possibilities,
a kind of irreverence of what to do with the heart in rage.

You tend to those now and exactly in rain streaming:
a figurative blue that pools and floods

damning everything but me with the incivility
of domesticity fighting to sound out all the activity

no longer between us, unanswered in time and space.
I would tell you every day if I could that you are still exuberant.

Photo by Lisa Jarrett

Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma is the author of four poetry collections: Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, Infamous Landscapes and Undergloom. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at University of Montana and is co-director of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing, held at University of Montana in April 2014 and March 2015.

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