"Plenitude"

I wrote out most of this blog only to have it erased by stupid facebook chat interrupting...THAT'S WHY I ALWAYS HAVE IT OFF. Does anyone know why (or how) it can stop me in mid type to address that someone facebook chatted me even when I'm in a different window? I don't like that.

I'd like to post a poem that I like alot. It's called "Plenitude" and was written by Paul Guest. We read his book, "Notes for My Body Double" in my poetry class and this poem was my favorite out of the whole book, if I remember correctly.
Here it is,


"That boy in the snowy late light\
midnight TV gives the skin, blue then\
dark blue, is me. With my mind\
shaped like a finger, I point\
him out. This is before he will point\
a borrowed bike downhill\
and touch me in return. This, too, is before\
rushing home in rain, through\
woods, stopping in a clearing of clouds\
and canopy to note moon\
like milk on my skin, in the water white\
and pebbled, for the first time\
in my life. I called it home, the apartment\
we would love in after class\
and there she waited while I drowned\
in my clothes, in that light\
bouncing earthward from the sun a world\
away. This is before I fell.\
This is before I swallowed back\
a new species of emotion\
I'd never known to live within\
my chest, before I said\
not a word to her that suggested I might\
go away and go unmissed.\
This is before I fled. This is before\
I hung in the elevator's throat\
and waited for the world\
to catch back up, for the world to spit back\
lost time. This is before\
I lost a friend to the vacuum of his blood,\
the blown veins leading\
back to his heart. This is before\
I loved three times. This is before\
I feared all day to lose\
the last, my heart pulsing like a lead cloud.\
This is before. Curled\
and in a clot, before long he'll sleep.\
He'll rehearse another\
life. All night long I wait and I watch.\
One by one I write down\
what he dreams."



**editor/writer's note: the backslashes [ \ ] are where the line breaks are in the poem. Unfortunately, my margins for the blog are too small for it to occur naturally when I space in between.**

Awesome. I love the sense of loss and nostalgia in this poem, and the images are to die for. My favorite line is, "I hung in the elevator's throat". I have that line underlined in my book actually. Anyways, if you like that poem at all, you should check out Paul Guest's book...the rest of it is just as rich.

<3 rach