Sunday morning
and four hours of sleep and in the car watching
my breath
open like a flower slowly toward the sun petal by
petal, soon red.
The radio sounds good and the radio has always sounded
good
and the radio will always sound good and my lover
sleeps upstairs in a bed
still impressioned by my long awkward body and she
hugs the teddy
and I wear the same shirt and jeans I wore last night
and the clouds are low
and sweet sweet gray and snow white but the weather’s
not cold. It’s early summer gold and
all the pirate children are leaving the coast like
they do every summer
and later the coast will be farther not visible and
the imagination the booty
that much closer and these mornings forever. And
now Danya Kurtz is singing
a Johnny Cash song and I’m on the radio and
if I’m not now I will be soon
and you should be too because we all love the radio,
all of us, early and late,
asleep and awake, we all love the radio, and we take
that love and we make it
something big and something lasting, and we wear
its ring, its bright, delicious ring
made from the dust of morning so every time it leaves
us the way it does
we won’t forget what once was, what still is,
underneath the hum, and in it too.
Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have
appeared in several print and online publications
including Chain, The Lyric Review, Ararat, Arson,
and Diagram. He released a chapbook of poems
called “An Improvised Device” with
Lock n Load Publishing in 2005, and his first
full-length book of poetry is due out in the
fall of 2006 through Spuyten Duyvil. His songs
have appeared in television and film and charted
on CMJ. His digital home for work is www.alanarts.com |