Love In Three Stages

by Sigrid Bergie Feliciano


1

At first the world held its breath,
stared wide-eyed at us.
I did not see the hunter
trembling in your dark eye,
or question flowers you brought
stolen from others’ summer gardens
like love lifted, colored and growing in my heart.
For days our bodies rose
on the wild blue smoke of your piano music,
poems braceleted with sun, with moon.
Oh, you were sweet in July, in August.

2

And then silence. A week.
Too many doubts then spoken
under a broken archway.
In September, the tree’s hard oak groaned.
One night you called,
words smudged on a phone receiver.
Leaves went on piling, piling
in innumerable voiceless flakes.

3

October’s house fills with the first cold of winter.
Outside the moon is a pale petal,
a forgotten swimmer in darkness,
and my mattress is a soft body of dream.
I sleep alone in a matchbox room.
The sheet slides over me
like a white wing.


* * * * * *

Sigrid Bergie Feliciano. The author of Turning Out The Lights which was a Minnesota Book Awards Poetry Nominee. Among awards from The Loft, New Rivers, elsewhere, her recent honor is an international Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019. Her poems have featured and appeared in journals and anthologies cross the country and round the globe and of late in A Cavalcade Of Stars, Mad Swirl, Burning House Press, The Galway Review. She lives with the ancient oak and pine, coyote and mule deer, and her husband in the foothills of Los Angeles.