She has her secrets.
Places she’ll dance in public.
But her moment is the fall.
Like a ship in a bottle
She’ll wait for raindrops
To fingerprint her chin,
And I guess it must begin
With leaves crackling over asphalt
Beneath the stoop in the corner pocket,
When smoke complicates air.
When she murrs and fish faces
And when she keeps a heart
Beneath her heart.
In her body
Autumn is forever,
Her bones are a recurring dream
In roots of oak wood trees,
In pails of lonely water,
And in me.
When winter tugs at her sleeve
She’ll stay an hour more
At least to memorize the trees
Dissolving into a switchback sky.
When the moon is a parrot
Echoing everything left unsaid,
Doors, windows flutter open
Wildly
Behind the stillness in her eyes,
Everything above her watching.
~ After 20 years of chasing his dream of becoming a professional basketball player, Casey Curtis shifted his focus toward more artistic outlets, particularly poetry writing. Curtis received a B.A. in creative writing and a master’s in poetry writing from San Francisco State University. Since recently moving out of the city to Lake Tahoe, Curtis, 28, enjoys a more subtle, relaxed relationship with poetry, and plans to one day teach creative writing to troubled inner-city youth.
