by Heather Treseler

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside
an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching
the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.

Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead
children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted
in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets

and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs
warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love
lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc

of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose
hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock
of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows

in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway
horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,
and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts

of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead
to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:
fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,

buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or
dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust
for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,

violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes
a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,
or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.

______________________________________________________________________

Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (2020), which won a chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Cincinnati Review, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays appear in eight books about contemporary poetry as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Boston Review. Her poem “Wildlife” was chosen by Spencer Reece for the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) and her sequence “The Lucie Odes” was selected for The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize (2019). She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center.

by Heather Treseler

A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside

an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching

the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.

Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead

children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted

in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets

and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs

warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love

lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc

of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose

hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock

of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows

in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway

horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,

and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts

of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead

to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:

fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,

buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or

dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust

for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,

violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes

a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,

or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.

*Note from the author: The italicized line is adapted from the famous anonymous poem “Western Wind” from the early sixteenth century. To read it in modern English, please visit: https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetry_in_motion/atlas/newyork/western_wind/
For my purposes, I swap out the first article (“a” for “the”). 

__________________________________________________________

Heather Treseler’s poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Obsidian, Southern Humanities Review, and Missouri Review, among other journals. She is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. In 2018-19, she is working on a manuscript of poems, Thesaurus for a Year of Desire, with the support of a fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum.