Rorschach Test
Cleaning my desk drawer I found
Your homemade post card, a tea kettle
painted in brown and purple oils.
It took a moment to see the pattern
of spout, fat body, and handle.
There are splotches of pain in white space, an ill-
defined border, and the kettle itself
is mottled, as if I could see its contents
of anxiety, atoms hitting each other
like hurled insults. This was your apology,
a psychiatrist's test whose pattern lies still
as a snapshot. I said nothing then,
but I see it now: the pot was ready to boil.
Somewhere there is a field of grass
so green that the dying yellow
of a summer sunset is able to color it blue.
The pink and scarlet flowers stippled
together in groups of whispering children
know the secret the field tells them:
there, against the orange pull of clouds
that hide the running sun, under
the silhouette of a large oak
that commands the field, there
is where we'll meet
between the waking worlds
that hold scenes liek this
so delicately that all we remember
on waking is that
someone was there while we slept.
I look over my shoulder
at the sound of feet walking over heavy carpet
That's how I met you,
a whisper above my left ear.
Like a note left
in the Dead Letter Office,
your voice hides in the pages of books
that slowly turn to dust on metal shelves.
--David Harbilas