Today's Poem - from Ansie Baird, In Advance of All Parting, White Pine Press Poetry Prize

Nothing of You

I

Sometimes I pretend you have tumbled
off the edge of the Persian Gulf,
dropped like a pearl
to the bottom of the sea.


You glimmer, but the indifferent fish
swim on.

You are my exotic, my precious
non-posession.

I would have you hammered
into sheets of gold,
molded into a brooch
I could pin on my lapel.

See, I'd say. There he is.
Doesn't he shine?

Ansie Baird, In Advance of All Parting