Philip Jason‘s poetry can be found in Spillway, Lake Effect, Canary and Summerset Review. His novel, Window Eyes, is available from Unsolicited Press. His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. For more: www.philipjason.com.

I Will Find the Grazing Song that Holds You

all I want is for this poem to take you somewhere
to carry you through a wall
in the house of some great blank spirit
I want your bones to be soluble in the ocean of peace 
I carry for you in the few inches of bodylessness
that precede my body’s forward progress toward you
I want the sun to rise through its adolescence
inside you, for the moon to be lit
by the day you first realized yourself to be
an angel holding human organs
the wind coats your skin
when you sail yourself between
my prayers like a fabric
you are the element of love in the belly of a song
may the riptides
pull the words of your body
from the quiet reshuffling of the shore

Holding Patterns

Oh darling, my heart is not
always open enough to give you what you’re after.
But there’s something to a limber imagination
that deserves credit for producing
a varietal of love that serves us.
The History of Tulips calls this love
exomarital, and offers us a comparison:
where the heart’s love is like holding
an other in our wings, the love that flows
through the imagination
is the engine that crosses the loneliness.
If you trust these words, come
with me. I will show you where
the missing pages of your life are hiding.
I have held them in my hands. When you close
your eyes, you see a face being prayed to.
This is what it feels like to crease the paper.
I am lucky to have found you in the rain.
The water meets the aura at your edges.
Show me how the feathers
appear from behind you.