Julie G’s Reviews > Honey And Salt: Seventy-Seven American Poems on Life, Love, Death, and Nature > Status Update

Can you begin to own
both yourself and your shadow?
Can you measure
moments in the sun
when your shadow lays down your shape?
Does your shadow speak to you
or it it you telling your shadow
what to be telling you?
Can a man listen to his shadow
hoping it tells him where to go,
what to do when he gets there?
Has ever been a man praying,
"Make me into a thin
goblet of glass, oh Lord,
I fear what my shadow tells me?"

When water turns ice does it remember
one time it was water?
When ice turns back into water does it
remember it was ice?

What is there for us two
to split fifty-fifty,
to go halvers on?
A Bible, a deck of cards?
a farm, a frying pan?
a porch, front steps to sit on?
How can we be pals
when you speak English
and I speak English
and you never understand me
and I never understand you?

Speak to the branches of spring
and the surprise of blossoms:
they too hope for a good year.