LOVE OF PLACE

Four Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
a Colorado writer and teacher

Of Course Sometimes

It isn’t what it seems.
For instance, from below
the apricot looks golden,

orange blush, weighty enough
to droop the branch as if
its sweetness is too much

for stick alone, and so launch,
reach to grasp it,
and with curled fingertips

feel the sticky wound, the gash
where the birds have marred
the fruit, and perhaps choose

to eat it anyway, unless, of course,
the earwigs and ants have found it first.
The disappointment. How it

turns the day, paints gray the apricot skin,
the tree, your hand, the sky
that only moments before

was more blue than you’d
ever seen it. And sometimes,
of course, whatever it is

that seemed so ripe,
so ready to harvest, so
golden, so sweet

really is.


Wishful

After eating the peach
all I wanted was another
and another and another

and a woman could go
wandering from produce aisle
to farm stand to orchard row

and never find another peach
so full of O, so full of sweetened
gravity, a black hole where

peach used to be—the tongue
now more particular, now craving
what was once, now rummaging

trunks of time for the thrill
that riffed beneath the fuzz, the
spilling golden juice, the mmm

of what cannot be labeled,
reproduced or named,
the bliss of knowing that

the Big Bang banged and served up
such a peach that curved
not only space but through

a woman’s sigh. Through pit where sun
has never shone, this peach
has grown, has grown into hunger

that never might be met, but I will
taste relentlessly, peach & peach, until
I find again the sweet-winged trill of

joy-song flesh that makes the lips
say O and O again, and O
for the pleasure of perhaps an O

let us eat another and another
and another, and if we find
another such one

such luck! such chance!
let’s eat it quick and set out again
in search of more summer rapture.


Not that I would go back

but there was that night
on the red sandstone beach
when the air had begun
to lose its swelter

and the sun was low enough
to cast that amber light
in which it seems easier
to fall in love with the world,

with the day, and with each other,
and we had escaped
the dinner hour,
the carrots half-cooked

atop the stove and the table
not yet set. Instead
we walked across the field
and plunged into the cool water.

How I loved you that night,
the broad thrill on your face
as you let the current carry you.
How I loved to be

the woman in the chill water beside you
wanting no life but this one,
faint scent of river breeze,
warm desert air, bright sound of cicada

encircling the beach, the field,
the home with the napkins still in the drawer,
and all around us, inside of us,
so much ripening.



Dominguez Canyon April 4, 2009

I wandered the canyon lined with snow,
through brown apricot blossoms that will not fruit

and startled the starlings, one hundred or more,
into swirls of black flight, oh shiver, oh low angled light,

oh world I am yours, I crumble like cliffs,
I am yours, I am praising your all that is:

these barren trees, this wind, these lips,
the song inside us that rises like starlings

regardless of chill, of petal turned dust.
Praise the soft laughter of purple mustard blooms,

this damp perfume that lingers
the morning after the killing frost.