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 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).