This poem makes me want to do everything today and not hide from any of tomorrow's fears. This author seriously amazes me. Brenda Shaughnessy. And I reek with envy that I did not write this or any of her other poems!!!!


Fortune

Luck today will be skill tomorrow. If only your fear
held now gorgeous in its white cotton frock
could become small and frayed in the next millennia.

Be brown and blowsy and on the ledge instead. Used
and fueling, a succubus cannot ruin what she pulls
on her tricky leash: dread's body, desire's body.

If terror bent double could thicken into a frenzy
for the last flushed basket of windfalls
that arms October, could you really wander

forever in that shelter? Are wondering and losing
the same? If you ply me now all pure-voiced,
with some sepia trinket from your big box of ducks,

could I sculpt this cold knowledge into the fresh
hot fruit swinging in next summer's
branches, slimsy in rain, saturated
in the pear-flustered color closed in your eyes?
This bleary, fragile calendar: Your disbelief,
your loveable haunting. How clever you are

tomorrow. The expert veils around your face, scarlet
fabric woven by apprentices whose fingers
are sad and large with the work of beginning.