Weekly Poem: 'Rime Riche'

**By Monica Ferrell**
You need me like ice needs the mountain
On which it breeds. Like print needs the page.
You move in me like the tongue in a mouth,
Like wind in the leaves of summer trees,
Gust-fists, hollow except for movement and desire
Which is movement. You taste me the way the claws
Of a pigeon taste that window-ledge on which it sits,
The way water tastes rust in the pipes it shuttles through
Beneath a city, unfolding and luminous with industry.
Before you were born, the table of elements
Was lacking, and I as a noble gas floated
Free of attachment. Before you were born,
The sun and the moon were paper-thin plates
Some machinist at his desk merely clicked into place.


[Monica Ferrell](http://monicaferrell.com/index.html) is the author of the collection of poems "Beasts for the Chase" (2008, Sarabande Books) and the novel, "The Answer Is Always Yes" (2008, Dial Press).