Poem for the Day

This is a golden oldy. I actually got the book this poem was in by accident. I was a sophomore in college and had joined a book club (QPB) because they were doing reissues of old gay and lesbian novels at the time. Through them I got James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, and John Rechy's City of Night. I'm sure there were others--but these are the ones I really read and re-read...oh, I did also get an omnibus of Edmund White's novels. They didn't do much for me, though I do love his essays. They were reasonably priced and actually not badly produced.

Anyways, I ended up getting a copy of Audre Lorde's The Marvellous Arithmetics of Distance because while I was trying to get the code number of a book in an adjacent column I wrote down her book's code by mistake. Serendipitous mistake, because I loved the poems in this book. I've since lost my copy somewhere along the way. I got the text for this from Aaron. This poem stands out as an oddity for me, in terms of favorite poems, because it's so reliant on metaphor.

Smelling the Wind

Rushing headlong
into new silence
your face
dips on my horizon
the name
of a cherished dream
riding my anchor
one sweet season
to cast off
on another voyage

No reckoning allowed
save the marvelous arithmetics
of distance