eating from the table of your knee,
rolling the warm clay of your leg?
Did I dream your mouth around
my ear, your tongue plying chords
long silent inside me. Did I dream
the thousand pinpricks in my body?
Did I dream you unfolding the stiff
wing of every forgotten page, dancing
beneath the moon’s umbrella of gravity?
Did I dream you balanced on cobbled
stones of earth, your mind a herd
of caribou, an eagle in flight?
I remember you at the water’s edge,
dipping your shell and bringing out
your own eyes. I remember bear
roaming night skies, deer at the edge
of the forest, water rejoicing over rock,
the sky at the center of the earth.
I remember standing in the house of the moon,
the peal of silver light ringing
on my fingertips until I found the iris
inside me, the hawk’s wing, the light
of stars burning deep in my hand,
shining in milky pools of my eyes.
Scott Owens‘ tenth collection of poetry, Shadows Trail Them Home, is due out from Clemson University Press this fall. His prior work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. His poems have been in Georgia Review, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry East among others. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Born and raised in Greenwood, SC, he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC.
