Two Poems:

Raw Bar

Why does it feel so good? you murmured while
losing consciousness after wave on wave
smashed into you & shook you to the bone.

Before going under, you had been kind
enough to steer me in the right direction
(up). I took it to the next level: congress

with you, the two of us joined at the hip,
less like a bicameral legislature
than a bivalve — one of the Raspberry Point,

Poppasquash, or Lady Chatterley oysters
we downed tonight, each of them held together
by just a hinge of skin the same as us.

You were the shore, I was the wave that broke
against you after building in the ocean.

Animal Self

Rabbit, possum, skunk, raccoon, or deer:
our first winter morning in a new house
finds me searching our snowy yard for traces

of them again after a lifetime. No
longer a Tenderfoot reading the signs
up north in Minnesota, the woods closer

here than there, I figure the boy I was
would come as far up on the man I am
as I do now on my Green Giant shadow

thrown by the ground-hugging sun. When I seek
the creatures of the night, I track the kind
of animal I've grown into that leaves

footprints on a sheet of snow & brings
to light the dark — us two down on all fours.

Randy Blasing
Michigan Quarterly Review
Volume XLIV, No. 3
Summer 2005

Copyright © The University of Michigan 2005
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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