Two Poems

by AM Ringwalt

IODINE

Listening to Leonard Cohen
As I do the dishes, I am
Somewhere else entirely
Palpably longing
It wouldn’t have been hard
To love
Hard to lose you, there, for a moment
Never mind
Forward moving
Settling in- 
To myself
Getting easier
Just to be
Wet
“Iodine”

VIOLIN

In this room you ask for a word I love
and I think prism, tho I’d said days
before to my lover it was O. So I wonder
what might connect the two, not as contra
diction but a compounding. The light
glints off glass hanging on a satin string
and the refracting opens my mouth
without thinking. Meaning, I don’t think.
Gerunds accumulate. Language echoes
and fills itself. I think of wind chimes
on my neighbor’s porch, humidity. And,
thru all of this, the low drone of a violin.

AM Ringwalt is a writer and musician whose work appears in Jacket2, Music & Literature, and Black Warrior Review. Called “rich with emotion” by Pitchfork, Summer Angel is out now on Dear Life Records. What Floods is forthcoming from Inside the Castle.

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