In a Better World Than This

Some people can handle their instruments
but leave them strewn over the storeroom.
Such men can teach you nothing. This one
sits alone by a classroom door, quietly eating the wind.
His umbilical was cut and he got five hundred dollars.
He laughed at his feet, looked at stars and smirked,
shrugged off dew on the dying petunias.

Why did I take the blackened apple he handed me?
The sunset turned the sky to torn linen, and a
cool pearl sat in the middle like a target
made of planks, simple as the rope
I pulled while hundreds of fish, out
of breath from making love, leapt
from the pond and got stuck on our clothes, where they remain.

Copyright © 2007 James Cushing All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission