Short Lines, Longing

Rhyming, too.

Photo by Ryan De Hamer on Unsplash

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A lot of my poems are written in lines that flirt with iambic pentameter — middling-long and cadenced, however loosely. Extra-short lines often make me feel as if I’m chopping parsley, or possibly prose … but then, when meter and rhyme show up, the short lines find a cadence of their own.

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LIFELINE                                                  1981


Across two worlds
and one wide ocean
to you on the shores
of another sea,
I cast one slender
swinging cable,
spun of my time
and the best of me.

The old world drowned
in its thread-like shadow,
its promise glowed
in the sun of the new.
From the drowning dark
to the shining promise
I followed the lifeline 
back to you.

And now we stand
in one world together
and walk in the sun
on the same bright shore,
and we look for each other’s
heart, and find
we’re as far apart
as we were before.

And the lifeline spun
to guide me home
has frayed from my hand
like a word untrue.
If its promise fails,
what stronger cable
can span what lies
between us two?

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VERANO                                                   2025


Hace nublado.
No hace calor.
Hace viento.
¿Verano, mi amor?

Quiero el sol.
Quiero calor.
Quiero verano.
Te quiero, mi amor.

Espero verano.
Espero calor.
(¡Todavía viento!)
Te espero, mi amor.

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This is maybe the oddest pairing I’ve offered you so far.

When I wrote Lifeline I was — lord, lord — in my early twenties, in the midst of an almost entirely imaginary relationship that was just real enough to make me miserable. A lot of poems from this season of my life have been buried, for good reason. This one, I can’t discard; its rhythm contains that late-adolescent misery, aims it, adds a swing to the longing I was awash in as well as the anger I was starting to let myself feel.

I wrote Verano just a few weeks ago. It started while I was using my daily free-write as a chance to exercise my new, slowly-expanding Spanish vocabulary; it started as a description of the day’s weather in the peculiar left-coast microclimate I live in, where July and August are usually gray and wind-battered and summer heat often doesn’t kick in until October or so. As I wrote, I started to imagine someone come here from far away, from a warmer microclimate: missing the real summer, missing their sweetheart too. And, well, I found some rhymes.

So, two poems about longing … and whatever else they’re about. I feel a little shy showing them to you; I was pretty young, in different ways, when I wrote each of them. They seem to want to be read, though, and when poems are braver than the poet they should probably get the last word.