Ekphrastic in the Noon Hour

after Hughie Lee-Smith: Desert Forms (1957)
 

Besides you, Zeke, and the Queen, hardly any
others find the eleventh letter as faithful

to our cherished ease. Your laugh in my hands.
What it must be to travel the distance of one

memory, never get lost. The meteorologist on channel
nine offers this weekend as the time to expect

partial coverage of clouds in the local sky and I look
at my aunts in the den carving together smiles

of you in the collage. They say it takes one
to know one. Accuracy or precision,

two ways of looking at how we will cut what
we care for to keep a piece for ourselves: the carpets

of our first home, the supper we needed to last,
the half of our language that follows the bias

that says a tongue waits to tell what the body
has been meaning to say. Sunday and I am in

the crib thinking of a less absent you. Our runs,
after service, to the store. Nothing, you’d repeat

like the gesture you’d reserve when all you wanted
was a peck on the brow. Heaven spreads its weather.

Read more from Issue 22.2.