Peter Tomassi: Two Poems

Of This | Bright Red Packages

Of This

If it had not been that bright.
If the mountain had been less green
or the trail had seemed harder to take on foot.

If from this aperture we could have seen
the quick cursive breath on the forest floor,
the buck, half-eaten and freezing,

the madman's wife nailing shut the cabin door.
Always in the thicket: the waiting to die.
Close by: something cringing to be born.

If not the life we chose, the one we allow.
That must do. But why do you lie?
Where are the river girls who were to follow us?

I pick at the skull of the mountain.
I still sweat. I sweat to pretend cool waters.
And it is not how it would have been.

If it had not seemed so bright, so easy.
You could have said this will not do, will never.

Bright Red Packages

If we had a single word to explain
tiny tracks in the snow that lead
          under the house to the woods.
For the conversation we overhear
          from the abandoned house next door,
and the iron ferret chasing its tail
          in the boiler before sunrise.

Or another — the word missing
from the sentence you awoke with
          after a feverish Saturday in bed —
which is egging on the faint laughter
          squatting in the white space of this page,
that also means clearing ice
from the wood pile by flashlight.

Poet's Biography:

Peter Tomassi's work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Chiron Review, South Carolina Review, The Distillery, Porcupine, Lynx Eye, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Comstock Review and elsewhere. His first book of poems, Mixing Cement, was published by Thunder-Rain in 2000. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia School of the Arts.