Lynne Potts

Just a Couple of Squid

Two squid met on an ocean highway while
I reflected how quickly squid and squish
come together, though I was a long way from
understanding quotidian and mid America
way way back—meridian of the same watery
highway that, in a way, says: Stay on your own side
of the ocean, and don't come over to mine;
we can go for a drink but don't put your squid
hand through my arm as when we met
with oysters, clams, quahogs looking on, me
speaking to you in a figure of speech as I find
squid is best for you to understand me, soft
spoken, drifted, delivered on a plate though
when push comes to shove which it always does
I don't know if I'm grounded or still underwater.

All Wells Are About

All wells are about love and if you invent one, it will be just as deep.
So we invent, for how else to get through morning's empty hours—
morning, full of the same air you draw up in the bucket of your well.

If air could hold your empty hand, it would take you to a roadside
where a wind artist makes weather vanes and sun dials with dry grasses,
sand, and deer bones, day after day for the love of the making.

And who loved snow storms so much he invented a glass ball
to snow incessantly with a tiny music box underneath
reminding the snowman of his love for beautiful Greensleeves?

Those who gaze through telescopes can place one at an open
window and see Andromeda, freed by Perseus from lashing seas
and a monster who also loved her, in his own empty way.

Three Mexican children with fuzzy brown eyes watch their mother
pull the edges of mud into a voluptuous bowl for strawberries floated
in cream bringing their husbands from fields they've made to grow.

So many ways of loving and always changing like steam over the well
on cold days, and if you're lucky, when it starts to slip from your fingers
you pull up the bucket and fill it and then you understand about making.

Lynne Potts won the National Poetry Review Press MS award in 2012. Her second book is forthcoming in 2015 from the same press. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Potts is Poetry Editor at AGNI. website