Abbreviated Meditation on Liquids, Gases, and the Interim Solid

Once, like a truculent rhinoceros, yes, 
              a rhinoceros
gutting me, my mother initiated 
the cankerous habit of hanging the
phone up during my time
in mid-sentence. I did not know mothers were allowed
that abyss. Television mothers did not hang up 
telephones on their children! 
Above me, the cracked ceiling began to crackle 
and appeared to lift lightly off any foundation.
Behind nostalgic wallpaper
of the pinkest peonies, rose tendrils
reeked of ammonia, and to my knees 
it brought me. I remained like that
essentially for years.
                                    At the last, you appeared 
from the pitiless desert. Lovely, basic, fitted,
sure and unsure of the both of us.

There is a big rumor that running water 
never freezes until blanching into cold-shoulder bondage—
forced by degrees into a humming, mobilized pause 
and yet, jetting about, a flurry of drama underneath.
Wind, otherwise just as happy relaxing as air, 
will bulldoze into star-crossed pandemonium,
starving for strange proteins. All sense of direction 
and decency scattershot. 

On a certain day of little breeze we walked
to the grand museum that kissed 
the lakefront’s steel blue-gray water.
Water I had drunk since my first thirst. Water I trusted.
Inside, a floor or two high up, and below the 
Periodic Table of Elements 
with its boxed letters and numerals
of the known world, to vouch
for steadfastness, Marry me, you said.
As a statement of fact.
You wore the humorless look of a man with a weighing
dish of silicon granules, and that
really rare look of the unflappably ensuing.

CYNTHIA SCHWARTZBERG EDLOW

Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow is the author of two poetry collections published by Salmon Poetry; her recent collection Horn Section All Day Every Day is the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award Finalist. Her poetry has won the Red Hen Press, Beullah Rose/Smartish Pace, and Tusculum Review Poetry Awards. Her most recent poems appear in Jet Fuel Review and Plume. Come by: cschwartzbergedlow.blogspot.com.