You Watching Northern Lights

Curtains lift us up through brine
Where your soaked hair
Is plastered to your face
When you rise from the pool
Into the ice blue rime
That breaks over the wave
You bring up with you
Pushing out from the water
You rise up on one knee on the ledge
Throw your head
The drops spun like hail
And spring
Foot up    out of the pool
Water sheeting falling
           Salmon leaps
Pink and green
Through diaphanous air
Fan of rainbow oil drips
Eminent fire off the dorsal fin
Arcs color down where you are
Standing bare bare of water
Your eyes glow in motion
Pulling the curtains over the wave
When I see your face in isolation
The garment is dropping from you

Copyright © David Dwinell 2003

The Look I Recognize

Until then
it was strange
when I saw him

he was walking in the crosswalk
he wore new shoes
of a different manufacture

his socks off-white
3 day beard
throwup stain on his old flannel
under the goodwill double breasted doubleknit

he looked back
at me looking at him
through the windshield
bug splattered eyes flange
it was difficult
but he gawked as he walked
gait stiff board legs
his wine in paper
gingerly feeling the bare pavement slab
putting his feet in the saliva

twenty years ago
i was the one who sent him out:
the same man i stayed behind
and sent out more to walk
between the lines
pathetic wrecks in whose unloved
lives i don't often recognize
my face and habit
of looking back at cast off shells
on empty street corners
wary of being stared at by themselves.

Copyright © David Dwinell 2003