When You're Away, I Consider Form
I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem.
A building’s a building…. I mean, it’s all structure.
—John Hejduk
I need villanelles of you pulling
my breath like lines moving down
the page and the promise of rhyme
bending my ear. I need a sestina
of touch, patterns of palm, stroke,
skim, brush, and rub returning—
a cycle of sound and pressure I
apprehend in my bones. I need
the triolet’s refrain rolling off
your tongue like a sample, new
and nuanced here and here and here.
It’s all structure is why I need angles
of play, the love our bodies build.
I miss you. The ache's more sour
than a dropped foot, a forced rhyme.
If you're free from me too long,
what will you jettison first? Meter?
Lines? Come home. Our sonnet’s
the fourteen creases in the sheets.
A couplet of light greens your eyes
only inches from mine when iambs
ascend atop iambs. Please. I need
you in haiku: distilled in syllables,
laid bare in the last line’s turn.
Reprinted from The Poet & The Architect (Terrapin Books, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Christine-Stewart Nuñez. Used with permission of the author. All rights reserved.