TRANSLUCENT
by Tim Suermondt
A word I like,
shine dripping from every letter.
Pugnacious is another,
though displaying it with gentleness
is not a contradiction and is superior.
How I’m looking forward
to standing on the deck of a frigate,
sailing to a metropolis I’ve always loved.
ANOTHER WRITER
He’s smooth and beautiful,
An angel of words.
He always puts both feet forward,
Both of them being his best.
He chronicles the human heart
From past, to present and future,
Always seemingly at the right place
At the write time. Such ease
And wisdom pouring like honey
Over his myriad readers,
Who never fail to always follow
Wherever he takes them: a golden
Highrise, a blue mountain top,
A street too lonely to ever forget.
He’s smooth and beautiful,
You’d never doubt he had wings too.
PERHAPS
for Agnes Varda
The night, dark as the Soviet, is here.
A cat gets lost right outside the apartment.
The world teeters on its axis—is this
when it finally falls off into oblivion?
An umbrella on a chair by the entrance
of a garage, vacations firmly put to bed.
A boy and girl looking outside the window
of a Place St. Michel high-rise, dreaming—
of red hearts painted on the street below,
the future brittle, but heroes fighting hard.
THE WORLD AND I STRIKE A TRUCE
While I’m reading—and it’s kept its word
and the truce has held,
not that our arrangement is foolproof—
the world will still sting hard
and I will continue to disappoint it
and myself from time to time.
But we relish the respite together
and self-pity doesn’t stand a chance between
us—a little lamplight, the city coiled
all around behaving itself admirably, the cold
outside pressed against my windows,
waiting and watching me turn every page.
BIO
Tim Suermondt is the author of five full-length collections of poems; the latest is Josephine Baker Swimming Pool from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, On the Seawall, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
