“Knowing” & “Verklaerte Nacht” by Malcolm Glass

         "Knowing"

	Drizzling rain smears the grime on the windshield of her car, while she sits in her purple turtleneck and wool skirt, waiting in the parking lot, surrounded by dozens of empty places. She twists the rearview mirror, reading the flaws he will not notice. Lovers, she thinks, are blind to such things in new-found passion.
	Last Saturday he guided them down a forgotten road in the state forest.  They had nestled under quilts in the back of her station wagon, singing together the single-note suspension of their first stolen time together, mid-air and breathless for the resolution, swift eclipse, the stuttering flare of a new comet.
	A blue Honda sedan swings into the parking space next to her. The driver waves and smiles. As he closes the door of his car, she stares at the muscles in his arm, as though she was seeing him for the first time. In this moment all she wants is her cheek pressed against the hair on his chest. 
	This man, settling into her car, closing his hand around hers, knows her, body and heart, as he knows a Brahms sonata, his hands far beyond learning the notes. He kisses her neck, burying his face in the fur collar of her coat, and she feels, already, the ending, the stretto pulling the coda from itself, her body falling into the final chords. 



         "Verklaerte Nacht"

I

Desert sand, pebbles, stumbling
rocks, pits of gravel evaporate
and fill the hump-backed clouds
blotting out the yellow-gray sky.

Lightning rattles the skyward
girders and dull thunder stumbles 
down the dry streams and fallow
cornfields, driving down the burden
of rain.



II

Under the mountains of ocean,
phosphorescent eels trace deep
sand with the letter S, weaving
flames into coils of anemone fire.

Condors rise from the midnight
sea valleys, shaking off their sand
shelter to fan breath into the rising
bonfire as Belugas slap the surface
of the sea.

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