Mary Kearns is a first year UCSB student majoring in English.
NOVEMBER
By Mary Kearns
1.
It’s a curious thing, these November feelings.
I notice them as I notice the mangled branches of trees,
cradling baskets of red leaves between their limbs, carefully, as though each leaf were a newborn baby;
the infant redness, like cardinals, and like scraped knees.
I notice the moist rotted tree trunks:
deathly black, life-giving wombs,
festering with strange new things that slink and skulk in the fetid dark.
I notice the way the sunrise sunlight illuminates the highway in the morning,
until even black tar is bathed in angelic light.
2.
I remember days when sharpness buried vagueness in the cold wet earth
and prickly details swarmed around me in brisk whirlwinds.
I remember a day when I waltzed in the rain and when wet concrete,
rough on my numb white fingertips, reminded me of warm couches crowded with friends.
I remember a day when legs were strewn over legs over legs.
When we thought we had domesticated something as wild as love: when we let our selves be irreparably
lost in the small space that some might someday call family
I remember the way the couch felt, and the way your arm felt when it fell over my shoulder: such a
delicious dead weight.
The fine light hairs that fell across your forearm: the width and breadth and depth and weight, in exact
measurements, calculated and absolute.
I become a mathematician when I think of you.
Someday I’ll tell you so, and then you’ll laugh your airy laugh, because
I know that only you would know
what any of this truly means.
3.
Again, I imagine myself as Zeus: enraged as mortals do what they were born to do, again and again: they
leave, slipping from reed baskets and into wide inane open space, giggling as they go. Again, I imagine
that the thunder rumbles in direct response to my own heaving sobs.