Commandment Ten
I love your eyes
they look like mine
they are dead
without design
And first comes first
second mission
this young breath
or hardened tail, this sort of
alabaster piece of history
standing tall on or around it
The first step and is it wandering?
The first hiccup, drawing out wonder
in the shape of a rabbit’s ear, a small
mole. the heart of a gutted deer
thrown to the underbrush
blood smell for darker.
I love your eyes
they’re dead like mine
uncurtained, hollow
to a white stone wind
Here is the first path, followed
commandment ten
swallowing wind: thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s husband
too true, blue shoe
And boundless and bountiful
like far fields
I see us stretched under a horizon
that knew us
in different bodies
your name, still Brian
I had another name
my hair was dark
so was yours
and you were taller than me
but you were
still you
Oh parade of glad tidings
she sings to the salty,
North Philly air,
the shade of a shire
some fragments of an image
in an Ikea catalog
this is called
a life.
(in the shallows
I heard you whisper
a quiet cut in a finger
it told me to tell you
these things)
Sun, moon, sun, moon
and the answers someone
called God gave in the reeds
that whistle at the lake
At Sodus Bay, where the white bellies
of sunfish float up around the dim banks
I wonder about you, where you grew up
not the town, but
what sorts of grasses, breezes, lonelinesses
Why did you work so hard
why was it so important
to tell me you were special
-Nina Alvarez
Poem of the Month 
send this to: Georgia Review after August 15. they like these sort of slow stanzas in meditation-type poems
If I may… cut: ‘but you were/still you’, ‘in an Ikea catalog’, ‘these things’, and ‘breezes’
i don’t intend to be sanctimonious at all. but this poem is so close to completion; i would have no truck with it whatsoever if it could make one or two tweeks to move it a shade from ‘sacred’ to ‘insular’.
what I mean is that the closeness of the voice draws the merely observed into the ‘observant’, when it could take the reader one remove from a type of intimacy that wants to be wanted–the way one knows that their lover could do quite anything to please them at a moment–but doesn’t.
hope you hear me.