Words for Levitation

By Emily Shearer

Favor me with an avowal, that all those hours of solitude you were weaving me something, a mystery or a tarp or a blanket of stars to drape across the shoulders of night.  If you’d wanted to, with the energy of hummingbirds darting in the yard you watched and harped on, you could have built me a garden for fall’s harvest.

Candy corn is more carnauba wax than candy, more dye than grain.  We could sprout our own wheat, spelt flour, dry fruit. Watch ice melt in our palms, palm lemons, all that yellow.  It isn’t often that the needs of the mother fall between the apples and the persimmons. The chalkboard has to be dusted, the erasers hung to dry, the wool socks darned or re-knitted altogether.  All that yarn has to be dis-ensnarled like traffic at a crowded airport. I left my calling card in the form of a knot. The voices left their own as echoes on glass.

My little dog’s ears prick up at the riffle across water, a zipper of wind stirring some leaves, their undersides a silver necklace at the throat of fall’s arrival.  

Can you put your hands around me like a muffler, season of grapes soaking in oak, season of crows, season of your husked voice whispering across the sheets, are you naked?  Will you touch me first?  Will you be able to count on a beat, a chain, a song, a rhyme, a bead, a breath, a note, a clock, a prayer, a second, a guess?

So many words rhyme with levitation.  

The only synonym I have is you.

EMILY SHEARER is an ex-pat poet and volunteer yoga teacher living outside Houston, TX, where she teaches Yoga for Writers workshops, bakes crazy brownies, and fights the power.  Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart, shortlisted for the Judith B. McCabe Poetry Prize, awarded the University of Houston Robertson Prize (runner-up), and published in West Texas Literary Review, SWIMM, Clockhouse, and Ruminate, among others.  Her favorite places on earth are the beaches of North Carolina, the hilltops of Prague, and the sidewalk cafes of any French-speaking country. She has seen ghosts in Vienna, witnessed reincarnation, photographed iguanas in Mexico, and written about it all. You can read her caffeinated musings and peruse her other projects at bohemilywrites.net.

Photo: “Oaks Farm – 7.47am” by James Whitesmith