You Also, Nightingale

By Reginald Shepherd

Petrarch dreams of pebbles

on the tongue, he loves me

at a distance, black polished stone

skipping the lake that swallows

worn-down words, a kind of drown

and drench and quench and very kind

to what I would've said. Light marries

water and what else (unfit

for drinking purposes), light lavishes

my skin on intermittent sun. (I am weather

and unreasonable, out of all

season. Petrarch loves my lies

of laurel leaves, ripped sprigs of

deciduous evergreen.) A creek is lying

in my cement-walled bed, slurring

through the center of small

town; the current's brown and

turbid (muddy, turbulent

with recent torrents), silt rushing

toward the reservoir. A Sonata

passes by too close (I have to jump)

and yes I do hear music here. It's blue, or

turquoise, aquamarine, some synonym

on wheels, note down that note. It's Petrarch

singing with his back to me (delivering

himself to voice), his fingers

filled with jonquil, daffodils, mistaken

narcissus. (I surprised him

between the pages of a book,

looked up the flowers I misnamed.)

Forsythia and magnolia bring me

spring, when he walks into the house

he has wings. Song is a temporary thing

(attempt), he wants to own his music.

Source: Fata Morgana (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)

Disability Poetics