📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00317 ◊ Leap Year Day ◊ Maxine Chernoff
Leap Year Day
The palcolithic heart might burst
with news of slowness, news of feathers.
All the softness listed in the register
you keep: day of finite crashing.
Who’s to say the deafness that you wore
was needed by the Grecks? Depression
sounded like a whole note sewn with
lilac thread. I wanted to assure you
that the small biology of kissing
would not last until the last pebble dried
and a flag wobbled and a list faded and a map
was drawn and a green planet drifted
under your lens. The elbowed dawn lifted,
and you said nothing of the storm that flashed
off-shore, as if to mean, forgotten winter
without signs. You will not fade.
I believe your wholeness as it rests its future
on our lengthening half-lit letters.
—Maxine Chernoff
—found in Leap Year Day: New & Selected Poems (1990)