Birmingham
Poetry
Review
Teaching Poetry
Because the classroom is fluorescentbright against a dark 5 p.m.
September sky, the window frames
a '40's film: gusting breeze
arches the chestnut limbs
to point at a couple just met
in the dusk. He is a still life,
leather jacket buttoned, hair too short
to blow, his legs sturdy and bound
as tree trunks. She flames,
long hair loose and lifting
like her open raincoat, everywhere
wings and curtains. What words
pass between then, and again,
to draw their faces nearer? Their lips
barely move. Now her right hand
rises, fingers curve in a sea wave
that coaxes the earth away
from gravity, the moment I can wait
no longer to turn to the chalkboard
and write a few notes about how lines
can move meaning back and forth
across the simple faces of words, lines
as shuttles picking up connotations
like ions, random until an atom's
magnetic orbit opens out
and epiphanies of exact motion
bond them. He bends to her as if
his heavy feet were pulling at roots.
Her flying hair screens the kiss
that I predict and I wonder what
I talked about for the past half hour.
--Marcia L. Hurlow
Marcia L. Hurlow has published poems recently in Poetry, Poetry East, and Chicago Review. She has published two chapbooks, Aliens Are Intercepting My Brain (State Street Press) and Dangers of Travel (Thunderstone Press). This is her second appearance in BPR.
