Susan Laughter Meyers
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Dear Heavy Traffic
Mornings I rise and hear you faintly,
close my eyes to pretend you're the sea.
Wave after wave, swells and lulls.
Once in the marsh spoonbills flew over me,
their wings a dream of improbable pinks.
Hard to quit looking. The only sound a whistle
of willets. I stood there meaning to forget
every stalled moment of you—headlight,
taillight, a chain of stops and starts.
But the birds, the arc of their flight,
how could I distance myself from coming
and going? Dear road hum, is it wrong,
this mute longing? I fill the shallows
with spoonbills. A given, their rhythm.
At low tide their heads troll greenly side to side.
Dear Yellow Speed Bump
One summer night a friend, on a dare,
played your game with other friends,
lying down across the narrow mountain road
and telling their best secrets. First kiss,
first time at sex. The game went smoothly,
I’m told, and so did the wine, but the secrets
were slow in coming, until one coaxed
the next, fact losing speed to fiction.
If only each day had its defining moment:
a subtle rise to catch a body off-guard
and lift it in serenity or jar it to attention
as we all wheel down the crowded road
trying to get somewhere, anywhere, fast,
when what we really want to do
is lay our burdens down on the loneliest
path and tell our only story to the stars.
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Susan Laughter Meyers, of Givhans, SC, is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press), which received the inaugural SC Poetry Book Prize. Her chapbook Lessons in Leaving won the Persephone Press Book Award. Her poetry has also appeared in numerous journals, as well as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column.