Friday Love Poems: Courtney Bambrick and Peter Baroth

From one of our favorite supertalented couples. Happy New Year, you two!











Morning Under Water
by Courtney Bambrick

You might know things, but
who told you what to remember?
When the summer ends in a rainstorm
and the nights are cool again
and your lover keeps his arm
over your body in sleep,
think of what you sacrificed
in order to keep from sweating.
The diamond small kernel of heart
twitches within you – as if a
thumbtack had been thumbed
into your sternum.
So precise and so painful
the moment we give up.
I have water boiling for tea
downstairs and I have
three folders of essays about language
to read before tomorrow,
but I also have a thick ache
for your soft fingerpads
and respiration.
I’ll turn the radio on and hope
that you wake up happy.
My tea will be sweet and milky
like I haven’t had tea in months.
The rain will soak the ground
and the flowers
that pretended to die rather than
scrounge for life will reclaim their green.
Some Sunday we will wake up
and eat brunch somewhere fancy,
then go sit through three movies
at three different theaters.
It will be a vacation.
Today is just this Sunday and it isn’t
fair to stretch expectations.
My alarm will go off again at 5:30
Monday morning. Now,
it is raining and will rain all day.
Maybe I will settle back into bed, slip
your eely arm back around my
sunken-ship body. I cannot tell
anymore if I love you more or less than
your body. I cannot tell if I
need the touch of your tongue as much
as the warmth in your eyes.
Either way, you will do the laundry
and I will cook a disappointing supper.
Sunday will be Sunday, and so the week
begins again.

Summer Smile
by Peter Baroth

The Rehoboth sunset ushers in turquoise twilight
as I find myself on the boardwalk
with its enchanting summer smiles
perhaps luring me in their ultimate conclusion
to some quiet jazz club or beachside bungalow
where the morning mist might slowly lift
to reveal the endless, pulsating,
blue expanse of the Atlantic.
I slowly walk away from the arcades
with their adolescent noise
onto the somnolent dunes
where the wind plays its pianissimo upon the reedy grasses.
Now, just feet from the passing fray,
I am in another world,
nature’s demi-monde,
halfway to the sea.
I think about those luring summer smiles.
But the next moment my mind turns
to the promise of much more.
A woman I’ve come here with
and will leave with as well,
will wade through the traffic with back to Philadelphia,
in whose eyes I will always see
the infinity of the sea,
the flight of the gulls,
and in whose arms
I will always feel the fine summery buzz of the Sun.
Yes, deep into February
I will look into her face and see the soughing dune grass
on the bright lip of a summer day
and I will smile like some wizened beach bum
who, in his day, has recovered his trove of pirate coins
from the shifting sands.